September 14: Mrs. Goldberg

Gertrude Berg (Tillie Edelstein), who embodied Jewish motherhood as “Molly Goldberg” on radio and television, died on this date in 1966. Berg was the creator, writer, producer and star of the Goldberg comedies, which were presented first as The Rise of the Golbergs on NBC (1929-34) and CBS (1938-45) radio, then as one of television’s first situation comedies (1949-54), for which Berg won an Emmy in 1950. The Goldbergs, writes Jeffrey Shandler, “offered millions of Americans an image of a second-generation American family whose Jewishness was, for the most part, a matter of comical speech,” at a time when “Jews were the object of considerable suspicion and discrimination.” She was, writes Scott Marks, “the Oprah of her day . . . adored by Jew and gentile alike.” Philip Loeb, who played Molly’s husband Jake on television, was blacklisted by McCarthyite forces in 1951 and committed suicide in 1955. Berg’s resistance against his being fired— through meetings with CBS president William S. Paley, Cardinal Francis Spellman, and other bigwigs — resulted in the cancellation of the show for eighteen months, which all but sank it.

“I didn’t get us out of the Depression, Molly Goldberg did.” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt (may be apocryphal)

Watch an episode of The Goldbergs from 1955: