Steven Gimbel's Einstein: His Space and Times, is an excellent book. It's a slim little book, less than 200 pages and with a rather large font, but at the same time it provides some of the very best summaries of the physics concepts that late-19th and 20th-Century physicists were wrestling with. For the first time I genuinely understood the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" and what it meant; just how Einstein proved the existence of atoms; how Lise Meitner recognized the splitting of the atom and nuclear fission; Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle"; and how Einstein proposed the quandry of "spooky action at a distance."
He also has one of the best summaries of how the otherwise respectable scientists Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark were warped by the crises of their times and by personal pique against Einstein to become (at least) nazi sympathizers and antisemites.
The book also became timely for me as it discussed Einstein's views about Zionism. The book was written in 2015 and Einstein (obviously) was writing in the mid-20th Century, but this latest explosion of Zionist barbarism reflects the wisdom of Einstein's views.
Einstein saw himself as a citizen of the world. In World War I he proposed a "United States of Europe." He was born in Germany but loathed the militarism and chauvinism of Prussian-Germanism. He was happy to move to Switzerland and he renounced his German citizenship. He also renounced Judaism. He'd been a fairly religious youth but science soon replaced the world of faith in miracles.
He moved back to Germany to take a prestigious post in Berlin where he would be free of teaching duties and able to pursue his theoretical investigations. But the rise of antisemitism in the 1920's and 1930's disturbed him. He did not see much of himself in the Eastern European Jewish refugees from pogroms in Russia, Ukraine and Poland. But he did see them as his cousins. He felt a kinship with them. But at the same time he rejected the denial of Jewish heritage and the incorporation of antisemitic beliefs in those Jews who wanted to pursue assimilationism. He came to believe there was a Jewish nation. They were a people defined by their heritage. He also believed that part of this heritage was a rejection of chauvinism. A (perhaps self-interested but genuine nonetheless) devotion to justice and understanding. As well as a respect for learning and creativity and industry based on being minorities trying to succeed in societies prejudiced against them.
He came to see Palestine as a place of safety for Jews as the situation became increasingly grim in Europe. His vision though, was of Jews paying their way in that new land. I guess we could see it as the "One-State Solution" proposed by anti-zionists today. There was no need for animosity between Arabs and Jews if they lived together, worked together, respected one another. Einstein did not call for the displacement of Arabs from the land. Nor did he support exclusionist schemes that separated Jews from the Arab community. He lost his faith in the whole zionist project with the rise of the Revisionist Zionist Party which he saw as nothing more than a Jewish version of fascism.
