A General Motors advertisement in People Magazine‘s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue features a buff, shirtless Albert Einstein with “E=MC^2” tattooed across his formidable deltoid. The caption reads, “Ideas are sexy too.” Clearly, the gas guzzling SUV advertised on the adjacent page is at same high level of intellectual achievement as the theory of relativity, and just as hot.
What GM didn’t remember, though, is that Jews own Einstein. Hebrew University, which claims all of the late genius’s publicity rights, has filed suit against GM for defamation. That’s right, you thought he was part of pop culture, but you better find another theoretical physicist to hock your gentile cameras, computers and cars, unless you have a permission from (and a check for) us.
And for the record, I think Einstein was kind of cute just the way he was.
The advertisement is so idiotic it hurts. But the rest is also really weird: Einstein was an anti-zionist…
Einstein was definitely not “an anti-Zionist.” He was a longtime cultural Zionist. Like many cultural Zionists, he was ambivalent about a state, but even before its founding, he worked on behalf of its creation (even attempting to convince Nehru to get India to vote for partition), and after its founding created a fait accompli, he certainly supported its continued existence. As for Hebrew University, he was member of its board of directors at its founding, and he bequeathed to them not only all his papers, but use of his image.