The history of Judaism and “Jewishness” in the US is a complicated one. Part of it is that we are dealing with both an ethnicity and a religion, not to mention a culture on top of that. But with the combination of a cultural history of insularity and a European history of oppression, Judaism and Jews remained foreign to most Americans, who had no experience with the culture or the religion. For many Americans, the first view they had into the culture was The Goldbergs. Not the long-running ABC sitcom, based on the childhood of Adam F. Goldberg, but the even-longer-running radio show turned TV show created and written by Gertrude Berg.
Berg was born Tillie Edelstein in East Harlem. Her parents were immigrants—her father from Russia, her mother from England. A brother died of diphtheria, leaving her mother chronically depressed; her mother would die in an institution. Her father had a resort in the Catskills, where young Tillie started her career as an entertainer. She married chemical engineer Lewis Berg. They briefly lived in Louisiana, then the sugar plant where Lewis worked burned down. The Bergs returned to New York—where Lewis would end up being part of the team that developed instant coffee.
Berg hand-wrote a script about a Jewish family living in a tenement and had a meeting with an NBC executive. He told her he couldn’t read her writing, and she read the script to him. He agreed to sign her and make the radio show—provided she herself starred in it. She would play Molly Goldberg for literally decades. Molly Goldberg was the kindly matriarch, who kept an eye on everything that went on around her. The family included her husband, his brother, and their assorted children. Not to mention the other families in the tenement.
What’s impressive is not just that Berg played Molly for decades, winning the first-ever Best Actress Emmy for the role she’d been playing for twenty years at that point. She also wrote every episode, both of the radio show and the TV show. She was executive producer of the TV show. She also wrote a play, which would win her a Tony for Best Actress. There’s a movie of it, but it stars Sir Alec Guinness as a Japanese businessman, and not even Rosalind Russell is enough to make me watch that.
While Berg deliberately kept The Goldbergs apolitical, she also let in some of the issues real-life Jews were dealing with. The Goldbergs got a rock thrown through their window after Kristallnacht, and apparently there is discussion of the Holocaust and refugees. There are episodes of the TV show on YouTube, including one that’s just . . . getting ready for Yom Kippur services. Ostensibly, it’s a family dealing with family issues. On the other hand, it includes some of the services, the first time most Americans probably would have seen them. And that’s quite a lot, for ‘50s TV.
