Geniuses From Einstein to Crystal
Good morning. It’s March 14. Today’s date in history reminds us that true genius comes in many guises, sometimes revealing itself in the musings of those who contemplate gravity, space travel and the limits of physics; other times it manifests itself in the whimsical world of a Hollywood studio. What I mean to say is that today is Albert Einstein’s birthday – and Billy Crystal’s.
Born in Manhattan, raised on Long Island, Billy Crystal is one of the America’s most beloved comedians. Albert Einstein was born in Ulm on the Danube River, raised in Munich, and became one of the world’s most revered intellectuals. Einstein traveled the world as he earned fame as a scientist and lecturer, and came to the United States for good in 1933 as Hitler rose to power in Germany.
Crystal’s father owned a music store and was a jazz promoter; their house was an eclectic gathering place for the greats of Dixieland Jazz. Like many boys growing up in the 1950s in New York, Bill Crystal idolized Mickey Mantle and dreamed of turning his success on his high school baseball diamond into a career patrolling the diamond in Yankee Stadium.
Baseball’s loss was the arts’ gain. But the funny man has a serious side. He is a devoted family man who raises money for the homeless; and visitors to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Southern California are greeted by a video of Billy Crystal welcoming them to the genealogical wing.
Like Crystal, Albert Einstein was raised by Jewish parents, but they were ecumenical enough to send their boy to Catholic school for a while when he was young. Some of that education stuck. Einstein is remembered in U.S. history as the scientist who alerted Franklin Roosevelt to the possibility of building an atomic bomb, but he had a spiritual side all his life.
Today, religion is pitted against science, but Einstein suggested in passing that this is a false choice. “Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God’s Nature,” he wrote to a female friend in 1897, “are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor.”
“I want to know God’s thoughts,” he also told author Esther Salaman. “The rest are details.”
Moreover, if Billy Crystal can be serious, Einstein could be funny.
In 1913, commenting on his already famously rumpled appearance, he told Elsa Lowenthal, “If I were to start taking care of my grooming, I would no longer be my own self."
And late in life, he quipped to the New York Times, “Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?”
