religious persuasion or ethnicity." Cherniss was appointed by his old friend Robert Oppenheimer who is sometimes known as the "father of the atomic bomb." Cherniss first met Oppenheimer at Berkeley in 1929. Cherniss had just married Ruth Meyer who had been in high school with Oppenheimer at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. (Oppenheimer studied in Göttingen until July 1927 and Cherniss studied there in 1927–28.) After the war, there was a national scandal over suspicions that Oppenheimer was secretly a communist sympathizer. Cherniss recalled in a later interview there was some pre-war evidence of Oppenheimer's interest in Marxism but made light of it: In fact, [Oppenheimer's] exposure to Marx occurred several years earlier, probably in the Spring of 1932. His friend Harold Cherniss remembered Oppie visiting him in Ithaca, New York, that Spring and boasting that he had read Das Kapital. Cherniss just laughed; he didn't think of Oppie as political but he knew his friend read widely: "I suppose somewhere someone said to him You don't know about this? You haven't seen it? So he got this wretched book and read it!" In July, 1945, when the world's first atomic bomb was exploded in the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer was famously supposed to have quoted a saying from the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Oppenheimer had studied Sanskrit at Berkeley and it was Cherniss who introduced Oppenheimer to his Sanskrit teacher, Arthur W. Ryder. Oppenheimer later claimed to have said those words but there is no contemporary evidence. In 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Oppenheimer had become one of the world's most famous scientists, Cherniss saw him at Berkeley. In 1947, Oppenheimer accepted an offer to take up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study. Cherniss was the first member of faculty Oppenheimer appointed to the institute. Cherniss and the Oppenheimer Affair Despite his fame, Oppenheimer had made many enemies who suspected he was a communist sympathizer or even a spy. These included Lewis Strauss who was both a commissioner on the new Atomic Energy Commission, which had control of the plants and personnel assembled during the war to produce the atomic bomb, and chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of Advanced Study. Oppenheimer was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. Strauss and others pushed President Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security