Gertrude Berg debuts in "The Goldbergs"

November 20, 1929

Actress, screenwriter, and producer, Gertrude Berg (1899-1966).

Institution: Private collection

Gertrude Berg's popular radio program, The Goldbergs, about an upwardly mobile American Jewish family debuted on NBC radio on November 20, 1929. Berg developed the kernel of the show as a series of live sketches to entertain guests at her family's Catskills hotel. It was produced in recurrent runs as a daily 15-minute program on NBC and other networks for nearly two decades before shifting to television in January, 1949. On both radio and TV, Berg served as the sole writer, producer, and star of one the nation's most popular programs.

Throughout its 30 years on radio and television, as well as in presentations on Broadway and on film, The Goldbergs dealt explicitly with Jewish life in the United States, joking about the cultural differences between "old world" immigrants and their American-born offspring. Berg's Molly became a cultural touchstone, a figure combining old world wisdom, new world common sense, and a mother's humanity in confronting the perplexities of American life. Over the show's three decades, the Goldberg family moved from a New York City tenement to the Bronx and later to suburban Connecticut, mirroring the upward progression of many Jews into the American mainstream.

Although Berg continued to produce The Goldbergs into the 1950s, the show's popularity declined. The demise of The Goldbergs reflects the homogenizing trend in postwar American society. As millions of ethnic Americans fled their traditional urban enclaves in search of an un-hyphenated, simply "American" identity in the suburbs, programming explicitly grounded in ethnic cultures gave way to more all-American shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. The Goldbergs went off the air in 1955.

Sources:www.museum.tv/archives/etv/G/htmlG/goldbergsth/goldbergsth.htm; www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/berggertrude/berggertrud.htm; www.radiohof.org/comedy/goldbergs.html; You Never Call, You Never Write: A History of the Jewish Mother (Antler, 2007).

1 Comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

I have a small traveling radio theatre company. We recreate old time radio to elderly residents of retirement homes and villages, senior centers and nursing homes. Many of the residents are Jewish. I am wondering where we can find any Molly Goldberg radio scripts Thank you for any help yo u can give. Propser Egan Producing Director

Donate

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

donate now

Get JWA in your inbox

Read the latest from JWA from your inbox.

sign up now

How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Gertrude Berg debuts in "The Goldbergs"." (Viewed on November 7, 2024) <https://jwa.org/thisweek/nov/20/1929/gertrude-berg>.