Albert Einstein is the most popular dead celebrity on Facebook. With 20 million followers on social media, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist has more fans than Tom Hanks. You can ask any kind of question of Einstein online and he will respond, often with a pithy quote from the extensive number of comments he made during his lifetime.
Einstein, of course, lived long before texting became a thing. But Benyamin Cohen, the social media manager for the Einstein estate since 2017, is Einstein’s alter ego online, posting up to a dozen times a day. “John Wayne is on Twitter [now X],” Cohen explains, “but he doesn’t have that much to say.
Marilyn Monroe is on social media, too. She occasionally offers some fashion advice.” With a wealth of Einstein ephemera at his disposal, Cohen – who lives in West Virginia and whose main gig is news director for – has written a fascinating and frequently irreverent new book, .
Cohen was in Israel to give a series of book talks, including at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, home of the Einstein Archives. Cohen is the first to admit he’s not a scientist. “I knew about the Nobel Prize, the E=mc2, whatever that means, the wild shock of hair that looks like he just put his finger in an electrical socket.
I came to Einstein through pop culture.” Cohen has a seemingly endless supply of stories to tell. Like the time a man stole Einstein’s brain, in what Cohen calls “the greatest heist of the 20th century.
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