Hans Bethe was a Nobel Prize laureate, a key member of the Manhattan Project, and spent 70(!) years (with some gaps to make those bombs) as a professor of physics at that beacon of knowledge, Cornell University. But this profile is not about all of that. It's about love. Love and Jewish mothers.

In 1925, Hans met a Danish physicist, Hilde Levi. The two fell in love, and, when Hans was visiting Denmark in 1934, he proposed. Hilde accepted, and the wedding was set...

Enter Hans' mother. She did not want her handsome son to marry a Jewish woman. Days before the wedding was supposed to happen, it was called off. Hans went back to America, to teach those bright scientific minds at Cornell. Hilde, distraught, never married. Hans did, to a goyishe woman named Rose.

Here's the kicker: even though Hans was raised Protestant like his father, his mother was Jewish. So why did she reject the budding romance? We can't say for sure, but we have a guess.

This profile is about love, Jewish mothers, and self-loathing.