Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in film studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema. In the following essay, she discusses themes of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity in Rhodes' account of the making of the first atomic bomb.

Rhodes devotes considerable attention to the impact of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity on the careers of many of the scientists who contributed to the Manhattan Project. Because of the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and other parts of Europe during the 1930s, many Jewish scientists fled to England and the United States where they generally found posts at prominent universities. Jewish nuclear physicists who fled Nazism included Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, all of whose efforts were essential to the creation...