AP Photo Actress Hedy Lamarr, along with composer George Antheil, designed and patented in 1942 a communications system that has become the underlying technology of the cellular phone. Here she is in 1941. H ad she been a man, she might have been remembered as a folk-hero inventor, the genius without formal schooling who transformed an era, a mid-20th century Thomas Edison. Instead, she spent her life in a very public form of solitary confinement: prisoner of the role of Hollywood goddess, sentenced for her beauty. The woman was Hedy Lamarr. A new documentary about her, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, is making the world round of film festivals. Wanting a release both from ever-fiercer summer heat and from politics, I went to the Jerusalem screening. The air conditioner coped with climate change. The escape from politics was less successful—unless you leave gender, immigration, and identity out of politics. Here's the side of her life that was publicly visible. She grew up as Hedwig...