The Forgotten Inventor of the Sitcom
June 9, 2025
On May 9, 1954, on the set of the CBS game show “What’s My Line?,” the week’s “mystery celebrity” strolled past a panel of blindfolded judges and, to a roar from the studio audience, wrote her name on the chalkboard: Gertrude Berg. A zaftig woman with warm, expressive eyes and a dumpling nose, Berg was dressed with Park Avenue flair, in a regal fur stole and three strands of pearls. Onscreen, a caption displayed the name she was better known by, that of a fictional character who, for a quarter of a century, had been as iconic as Groucho Marx and as beloved as Mickey Mouse: the irresistible, Yiddish-accented, malaprop-prone Bronx housewife Molly Goldberg, hollering “Yoo-hoo, is anybody?” into her tenement airshaft, the social network of its day.
The past year had been a difficult one for Berg, then fifty-four, whose family show “The Goldbergs”—originally titled “The Rise of the Goldbergs”—débuted in 1929 as a radio serial that bounced between networks before settling on CBS, becoming a national sensation. During the Depression and the Second World War, Berg had beavered away at an astonishing pace, producing, writing, directing, and starring in thousands of episodes about a hardworking Jewish immigrant family. In the process, she’d become a multimedia mogul, with an advice column called “Mama Talks,” a comic strip, a best-selling cookbook, and even a line of housedresses for full-figured women. In a national poll in Good Housekeeping, Berg was ranked America’s second most admired woman, bested only by another liberal firebrand, Eleanor Roosevelt.
In 1945, Berg’s radio show ended—and four years later she rebooted it as a television sitcom on CBS, during the loosey-goosey early days of the medium, when shows still aired live and were run by advertisers. Working with General Foods, she flacked Sanka decaffeinated coffee in character as Molly, boosting the brand’s sales; in 1951, she won the first Emmy for Best Actress, beating out Imogene Coca, Helen Hayes, and Betty White. Television was about to transform the culture, and Berg was poised to become one of its greatest luminaries.
Instead, just three years later, her life’s work was in peril. In 1950, as the McCarthy era descended, an ideological cage dropped over the industry, terrorizing a community of liberal-minded creators, among them Philip Loeb, the actor who played Molly’s husband, Jake, on “The Goldbergs.” Loeb had his name printed in “Red Channels,” the notorious anti-Communist snitch book. For a year and a half, Berg fought hard for Loeb, refusing her sponsor’s demands that she fire him, but CBS dropped the show, and in the end she gave in. “The Goldbergs” was now airing on the more marginal DuMont network, with a new sponsor and a new Jake. Another family sitcom had taken Berg’s old Monday-night slot on CBS: “I Love Lucy,” starring Lucille Ball, the First Lady of television.
On “What’s My Line?,” Berg gave little indication that anything had gone wrong. When one of the panelists, the actress Faye Emerson, who’d noticed the extended applause at Berg’s entrance, asked, “Are you someone very much in the public eye?,” Berg scored laughs by answering in the high, breathy voice of an upper-crust Brahmin: “Rahther!”
“Have you appeared regularly on television?” Emerson asked.
“On and off, yes,” Berg replied. She then added, nearly inaudibly, a sly zinger: “Depending on the sponsor’s disposition.”
Yes, Berg said, she’d been on the stage; she’d made a movie, too. And, yes, she said, her eyes sparkling, her character was famous for her accent. After a few false leads, the TV host Steve Allen blurted out the correct answer: “Is it Molly Goldberg?” Delighted, the panelists asked Berg for a treat, a taste of her character’s voice.
“Vot do you want me to say, dahlink?” Berg shot back, channelling her alter ego with a grin. Before she left the stage, the panelists rose up to shake her hand. For a moment more, Gertrude Berg was still the apple of America’s eye.
In the just-so story that Americans learn about television, it all started in the fifties, with Lucy Ricardo wailing “Waaaahhh!” in her brownstone on East Sixty-eighth Street. The family sitcom was the mass medium’s primal format, the source of both brash marital farces like “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners” and blander offerings like “Father Knows Best” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” placid fantasias of white suburban conformity, with rock-jawed commuter dads and moms vacuuming in pearls. Each decade, new neighbors moved in: in the seventies, the Bunkers and the Brady Bunch; in the eighties, the Cosbys and the Conners. The small screen became a mirror that your own family could gaze at, to catch a glimpse of another family, seated on their own sofa, in front of their own TV.
The Goldbergs were the first of these reflections. Sweet, sharp, and a little schmaltzy, the show was set in a world of Jewish immigrants—rag-trade workers, bighearted housewives, crowds of cousins and assimilated children crammed into tenement kitchens, with kreplach sizzling on the skillet. Yet, despite the cultural specificity, Molly, Jake, and their children, Rosalie and Sammy (known as Sameleh), were portrayed not as ethnic exotics or vaudevillian “types” but as ordinary Americans, patriotic and emotionally relatable—a provocative idea in a period when Jews were widely viewed as outsiders at best, subversives at worst.
When “The Goldbergs” disappeared, so did the legacy of Berg herself, the first “showrunner” of any gender and a life-style influencer fifty years before Oprah or Martha Stewart. By 2013, the memory of Berg had been so fully eclipsed that when ABC launched a new family sitcom called “The Goldbergs”—written by the unrelated Adam F. Goldberg and based on his adolescence in nineteen-eighties suburban Philadelphia—few people even registered the echo. Berg, like many Jews of her generation—including my own grandmother Malka, known as Molly, who passed through Ellis Island the year “The Goldbergs” débuted on the radio—had been a fierce optimist about America, a true believer in cultural progress and in a democracy that opened its heart to new arrivals. But, in the end, Berg’s life became proof of a darker truth, one that is newly relevant in the Trump era: doors that swing open can also slam shut.
There have been a few attempts, in recent years, to fly Berg’s flag again, including a 2007 scholarly biography by Glenn D. Smith, Jr., and, in 2009, Aviva Kempner’s lively, affectionate documentary “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” featuring interviews with Berg’s family and colleagues. In 2021, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong published the excellent “When Women Invented Television,” which skillfully wove Berg’s story into those of three other neglected innovators: Irna Phillips, the creator of the soap opera; the Black jazz chanteuse and DuMont-network TV host Hazel Scott; and Betty White (less forgotten, although few people know she basically invented the TV talk show).
Still, on a frigid January day, as I leafed through Berg’s archive, at Syracuse University, her story felt peculiarly like a cold case—or like a symptom of a stroke, a gap in shared memory. Why had she been forgotten, when her peers had lingered on as nostalgic figures, totems of a safer, simpler time? In her papers, there were thick scrapbooks of Christmas cards, many from fellow-celebrities—Berg clearly adored Christmas. There were piles of fan mail, from both Jewish and non-Jewish fans, often addressed to Molly Goldberg. There were more intimate notes, too, addressed to her birth name, Tillie Edelstein, documents so fragile that they flaked when I lifted them up, snowing on the page.
Born in 1899, Tillie grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Harlem, the daughter of Jake Edelstein, a speculator who owned a run-down Catskills hotel called Fleischmanns, and his doting, fragile wife, Dinah. In “Molly and Me,” Berg’s 1961 memoir, she portrays her relatives—mavericks like her tinsmith grandfather, Mordecai, who fled persecution in Poland and kept a secret still for making schnapps—as a crew of cheerful self-mythologizers, eager to bend an anecdote to make it more romantic, less tragic. Berg shared that tendency: in the book, she never mentions her older brother, Charles, who died of diphtheria at around the age of seven, devastating her parents. (Her mother had a nervous breakdown; her father kept the telegram announcing Charles’s death in his pocket for the rest of his life.) Instead, Berg sticks to her joyful summers at her father’s hotel, where she ran the theatre program, performing a fortune-teller act on rainy days and, beginning at fourteen, staging sketches based on hotel gossip. These stories starred Maltke Talnitzky, a woman in her fifties with a lousy husband and a lot of legal troubles. (Many of the hotel’s guests were lawyers.)
Among those summer guests was Tillie’s future husband, Lew Berg, a British chemical engineer, who impressed Tillie with his posh accent. (“He said ‘whilst’ and ‘hence’ and ‘shed-yule,’ ” she marvels in “Molly and Me.”) The couple married when she was nineteen and he was twenty-nine, then moved, for three miserable years, to the Deep South, where Lew worked as the chief technologist of a Louisiana sugar plantation. To her relief, the refinery burned down, giving the couple an excuse to settle in New York. And then, shortly after the birth of her second child, in 1926, Berg made a grand leap, changing her name to Gertrude—more Park Avenue, less Harlem—and diving into show business.
With her husband’s support (he typed up her scripts throughout her career), the newly minted Gertrude Berg hustled for jobs, scoring odd gigs like a role narrating a Yiddish-language Christmas-cookie ad aimed at Jewish consumers. She also sold four episodes of her first radio show, “Effie and Laura,” a serial about two shopgirls in the Bronx talking about the meaning of life. It was an audacious concept—a proto-“Laverne & Shirley,” it likely aced the Bechdel test more than fifty years before it was invented—but the show became Berg’s first lesson in power. The network, offended by one of Laura’s cynical zingers, that marriages are not made in Heaven, axed the show after a single episode.
Luckily, Berg was busy polishing another script, this one starring a Maltke-ish heroine, only younger and luckier in love. According to a story Berg loved to tell, her handwritten script for “The Rise of the Goldbergs” was illegible, so an executive asked her to read it to him—and then, charmed, insisted that she play the lead. (On one occasion, she claimed that had been her plan all along.) The first episode aired a month after the stock-market crash of 1929, perfect timing for a story about a family struggling to stay afloat. Berg got up at six to write scripts, perfecting each detail, down to the authentic sizzle of eggs on the stove. In the course of fifteen years, “The Goldbergs” expanded to include some two hundred characters, with lively figures such as the querulous Uncle David, obsessed with his doctor son, Solly. At its height, the serial reached ten million listeners, airing multiple times per day.
The heart of the show was Berg’s performance as the redoubtable Molly, a meddler and a chatterbox but also the show’s moral heroine, a problem solver energized by the troubles of others. In the pilot episode, Jake, a dress cutter, needs money to go into business for himself. Molly saves the day, grabbing a teapot from a closet, where she’s been saving a secret stash of cash. Loving and resourceful, Molly was both an homage to Berg’s relatives and a compensatory fantasy, a contrast to Berg’s own grief-stricken mother, who became mired in a lifelong depression. Berg herself wasn’t much like Molly: she didn’t cook, clean, or even read Hebrew. (Lew taught her the Yiddish script for that cookie commercial, phonetically.) A secular highbrow, she read Russian novels and owned a Picasso; her workaholic devotion to her fictional family strained her relationship with her daughter, Harriet. Still, like Molly, Berg had a deep, empathetic curiosity, an extrovert’s urge to explore the world around her: to find new plots, she sneaked down to the Lower East Side to eavesdrop, once joining a women’s group under an assumed name.
From the start, the character of Molly Goldberg made some listeners nervous. Was the portrayal a form of minstrelsy, like the crude blackface dialect humor of “Amos ’n’ Andy,” the only radio show with higher ratings? But, if Molly was a trope, she was also a corrective to an earlier stereotype, that of the mournful, self-abnegating “Yiddishe mama”: the saintly shtetl survivor in the 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer”; the humble bubbe of Sophie Tucker’s signature song, “My Yiddishe Momme”; the anxious mama bird in the 1938 poem “Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym,” so terrified her child will freeze that she weighs him down with scarves and hats until he can’t lift his wings. Like this sorority of martyrs, Molly sacrificed, scrimped, and saved. But she was also full of joy, appetite, and opinion; she was more of a baleboste, the Yiddish term for a powerhouse, a do-everything. She took up space, instead of shrinking.
So did Berg—and her left-leaning politics were part of that force. In the mid-thirties, she renegotiated her contracts to gain greater creative control; increasingly, she filled the show’s dialogue with pro-worker, pro-New Deal themes. At a time when the demagogue Father Coughlin was flooding the radio with antisemitic hate speech, Berg offered counterprogramming. In 1933, Berg ran what amounted to a Very Special Episode: a full Seder, sung by a real cantor, which Pepsodent, her sponsor, agreed to air without ads. The P.R. move paid off: one telegram read, “JUST AS PEPSODENT ACTS AS A DISINFECTANT SO DOES YOUR BROADCASTING TO DISPEL HATRED AND BRINGS HUMANITY CLOSER TOGETHER.” Six years later, Berg aired an even more pointed Seder episode, in which a thug threw a rock through the Goldbergs’ window—a reference to Kristallnacht, which had occurred a few months earlier. At the Seder, Molly compared liberatory ideas to the wind, an invisible force that blows everywhere and can’t be contained, even in the face of fascism.
Jewish listeners wrote her letters full of pride—some kept the radio on during their own Seders. One joked, darkly, that she hoped “The Goldbergs” wouldn’t encourage her neighborhood’s “Hitlerites.” But non-Jewish fans wrote to Berg, too, with a complex parasocial intimacy, often confiding their feelings about her “race.” A Mrs. W. D. Arena wrote that, “having been thrown in with them” during travels in Colorado, she had “learned to esteem them very highly”; a woman whose daughter worked at a hospital assured Berg that poor Jewish patients were the most appreciative demographic. An especially prolific Episcopalian superfan named C. M. Falconer weighed in on the show’s plots, like a modern recapper, and spun out several hair-raising theories about the roots of Jewish men’s business savvy. Frank R. Jennings, from Chicago, sweetly mimicked Molly’s accent in a postscript: “Please excuse it the typewriter, it aint so well to-day yet and don’t ask it me vhy, I don’t know vhy.”
For both sets of fans, it mattered that the show was made by Jews. “I believe you’re really truly Jewish,” one viewer enthused; another described a debate over Berg’s ethnicity with her husband, who thought she might be faking it. Still, the question of authenticity was a sensitive one: in 1933, after Berg dropped a Gentile actress who had been temporarily filling in for the girl who played Rosalie, the actress’s mother complained to Pepsodent, leading the right-wing gossip columnist Walter Winchell to denounce Berg: “Hitler victims using Hitler methods? Shame!”
The scandal stung, as bad publicity always did. In radio, advertisers had the final say. But Berg had a weapon of her own. Despite strong ratings, “The Goldbergs” faced cancellation several times: her bosses (including, and often especially, the Jewish ones) had never been fully at ease with the show’s ethnic bluntness or its politics. Each time, Berg stayed on top with the help of her fans: once, early in the serial’s run, after she skipped a few episodes because she got sick, thousands of worried letters poured in. As the media historian Carol Stabile wrote in her 2008 lecture “Red Networks: Women Writers and the Broadcast Blacklist,” “Only its popularity among listeners, which Berg herself repeatedly leveraged in support of the program, kept it on the air.”
“The Goldbergs” was cancelled in 1945, supposedly because of low ratings, although Berg’s family suspected that politics were a factor—a memo had gone around CBS which listed Berg, who had stumped for F.D.R., as one of the President’s boosters. For a while, Berg hovered in show-biz limbo, developing other projects, including a “Negro show” and an adaptation of the comic strip “Penny,” about a Wasp teen-ager. She’d already tried out “House of Glass,” in which she played a very different character: the hotel manager Bessie Glass, a “crisp modern exponent of efficiency” running a family business in the Catskills. But by then it was hard for her fans to accept her as anyone but Molly.
In 1948, Berg staged “Me and Molly,” a Broadway play, and then approached the newly established television networks with a reboot of “The Goldbergs,” reinvented as a sitcom. Televisions were still pricey gadgets, and the audience was small and urbane; nearly everything on the air was adapted from radio, theatre, and vaudeville. With such attractive I.P., Berg was confident that she’d get the go-ahead, but, to her shock, she found no takers, even at CBS. With Molly-ish moxie, she pushed back, insisting on a meeting with her old CBS boss, William S. Paley. He relented, and Berg was proved right almost immediately: when “The Goldbergs” débuted on TV, on January 10, 1949, it became a smash hit, with General Foods signing on shortly after.
Berg radiated charisma onscreen, opening each episode perched in Molly’s tenement window, confiding directly to the home viewer about Sanka’s benefits: “The sleep is left in!” Live television was even more breakneck than making radio—it was like mounting a brand-new Broadway play each week—but the long hours paid off, as Berg helped forge the key elements of TV comedy, down to neighbors bursting through doorways. There was a kinetic spark between Berg and Loeb, evoking the warmth of a long marriage, at once skeptical and tender. Eli Mintz, a Yiddish-theatre star, played Uncle David with a high, wheedling voice, his hands a blur of gesticulation, and the Goldberg children were portrayed by Gentile actors, including the endearing Arlene (Fuzzy) McQuade as the preteen Rosalie, a studious girl with a sleek bob. In the series’ signature shot, neighbors gossiped from their windows across the airshaft, their voices overlapping. These sequences highlighted Molly’s gift for speaking, as she often said, “from our family to your family.”
Only a handful of these early episodes still exist, preserved on kinescope, created by filming a TV screen. In one, which aired in September, 1949, the Goldbergs get a new, neglectful landlord. As Molly and Jake argue about the best way to confront the problem, Jake—in high dudgeon, waving his finger like a baton—makes the case for a rent strike, tearing up his rent check and calling for a building-wide protest. (As he fulminates, he throws in his own Mollypropism: “Ignorance is nine-tenths of the law!”) Molly, the house moderate, lobbies to treat the landlord like “a person,” giving him a birthday cake. It’s played as wacky farce, with Uncle David’s voice interrupting Molly’s sweet talk with gibes about broken elevators, but it’s unmissably political. And though Molly’s humanism usually saves the day, this time Jake has a point: aiming for a compromise, Molly accidentally negotiates the rent up by two dollars.
As with much TV from this period, there’s a lovable amateurism to the entire endeavor: in one comic sequence, a housepainter slaps a series of new colors on the wall, a joke that doesn’t land (probably because color TV was still five years off). Still, the episode captures the show’s rich tonal blend, its combination of screwball comedy and sincere concern with the daily troubles of working people, the small dramas that add up to a life. The show’s focus on workers’ rights extended behind the scenes: Berg hired left-wing firebrands like Burl Ives and Garson Kanin as guest stars, and she crossed the color line on both radio and TV, hiring the Black actress and civil-rights activist Fredi Washington. In 1950, “The Goldbergs” also helped lead a technician’s strike, forcing CBS to substitute other programming. Berg herself was a millionaire, with a home on Park Avenue and an estate in Bedford Hills. But her project was a magnet for a different crowd: the bohemian set who frequented Café Society, an integrated night club in Greenwich Village. In the late forties, when television was itself an unpainted wall, it still felt possible for these idealists to define the medium, to tell the types of stories that got censored in Hollywood.
That artistic circle included Loeb, an established actor and director who had played Jake on Broadway. A First World War veteran who’d co-written a Marx Brothers movie, Loeb was a pro-union activist devoted to improving the lives of theatre workers. He was a natural target during the second Red Scare—McCarthyism—which began in the late forties, spearheaded by a group of ex-F.B.I. agents who operated under the name American Business Consultants. In 1947, these former G-men started publishing a newsletter called Counterattack, a sort of anti-Communist burn book focussed on the film industry; in theory, their targets were Communist Party members, but in practice the net extended to anyone who supported Black civil rights or unionization, anyone suspected of being gay or of spreading “subversive” ideas. When Congress called these targets to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a group of defiant creators, the Hollywood Ten, refused to “name names.” They got blacklisted, and were jailed for contempt of Congress. Hundreds of artists fled to Europe or went into hiding, working under pseudonyms.
Television, still a small industry, wasn’t yet a significant target. In fact, in 1949, when American Business Consultants leaned on General Foods and CBS executives, threatening to feature Loeb’s name if they didn’t agree to subscribe to Counterattack, they simply said no. A year later, everything changed. At the time, “The Goldbergs” was flying high: Berg had been nominated for Best Actress, and the cast filmed a spinoff movie, “Molly,” in Los Angeles, during their summer break. Then the axe fell. In June, Counterattack had released the book “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television,” adorned with the image of a red hand clutching a black microphone. It was an amateurish compilation of innuendos presented as fact, the Libs of TikTok of its time. Between its covers was a list of a hundred and fifty-one people in the entertainment industry, many of them on CBS. Loeb was on the list.
The document had no legal force, but that didn’t matter: suddenly, anyone in “Red Channels” was in danger, along with anyone associated with those people. In September, General Foods gave Berg two days to fire Philip Loeb. He rejected the idea of a buyout—he wanted to fight, he told her—and she supported him, hugging him and telling him, “I will stick by you.” For a year and a half, Berg held to that promise, stalling, negotiating with her network bosses and her sponsors, hoping the crisis would blow over. Just as she had in the past, Berg used her loyal audience as a tool, threatening to launch a national boycott of General Foods. The threat worked, but the reprieve was temporary.
As the pressure built, Berg got desperate. At one point, she approached Cardinal Francis Spellman, who was New York’s most infamous power broker. A prominent anti-Communist, Spellman moonlighted as a fixer during the blacklist era—and he’d purportedly helped to rescue Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, as a favor to the TV host Ed Sullivan, who was Catholic. Berg, however, got nowhere: Spellman simply strung her along.
CBS had dropped “The Goldbergs” by then, replacing it with “I Love Lucy,” which had been scheduled to run as a companion to Berg’s show. Berg jumped over to NBC, but no sponsor would sign up with Loeb in the cast. Finally, in January, 1952, she gave in. Loeb got a generous deal, ninety per cent of his salary for the run of the show—money he desperately needed, as the sole support of a schizophrenic son who lived in a mental institution. He released a statement that let Berg off the hook; in response, she released a supportive statement saying that she had never believed he was a Communist. Still, it was a painful split. Loeb, unable to work, living with the family of his friend and fellow blacklist victim Zero Mostel, sank into despondency. In 1955, he checked into the Taft Hotel and took an overdose of pills, killing himself.
In “When Women Invented Television,” Armstrong describes her own visit to the Syracuse archive, where she found one slim folder dedicated to Loeb. She struggles to imagine a better ending to the story, another way out. Could Berg have launched that boycott, instead of merely threatening to do so? What if she had joined forces with other targets, like Hazel Scott, a star at Café Society who, like many Black artists, had her name printed in “Red Channels,” and had her own tragic downfall? Would the McCarthy era have been cut short? Or would “The Goldbergs” have simply been cancelled faster—particularly after CBS, once the most liberal network, started requiring its staff to sign loyalty oaths? Loeb’s blacklisting, Armstrong writes, became “one of the first, and most ominous, signs of the conformity that television would demand.”
By the time “The Goldbergs” aired its last episode, in 1956, Berg had absorbed the lessons of her age. In the show’s final year, she expressed this Realpolitik simply, in an interview in Commentary: “You see, darling, I don’t bring up anything that will bother people. That’s very important. Unions, politics, fund-raising, Zionism, socialism, inter-group relations. I don’t stress them. And, after all, aren’t all such things secondary to daily family living?” The Goldbergs were Jewish, but they weren’t “defensive” about it, she explained—nor were they “especially aware of” their ethnicity. Moreover, the actors who played Rosalie and Sammy were “just average-looking young people, not Jewish.” Although the show had once been called “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” Jake would never make it big, the way his creator had. “I keep things average,” Berg noted. “I don’t want to lose friends.”
At this point, “The Goldbergs” was airing in syndication, watered down by network notes. The family had moved to a Connecticut suburb, tellingly called Haverville, where Molly looked like an ethnic outsider, with no airshaft to yell into; Jake had been recast with new actors—first Harold J. Stone, then Robert H. Harris—who exuded a cooler, more distant air, closer to the dad on “Father Knows Best.” In 1952, the newspaper columnist John Crosby, his era’s shrewdest observer of radio and television, had written a biting dispatch, describing the rebooted series as “mighty subdued, its earning power diminished, its chief male actor missing, its format extensively rearranged.” Crosby had sympathy for Berg’s vexing situation, but more for Loeb, whom he portrayed as tragically isolated, having been dropped by an industry so wary of controversy that it didn’t even have the guts to fire him: “Sponsors didn’t fight; they simply melted away until Loeb was out of the picture.”
In its final years, new themes had begun to leach into “The Goldbergs,” among them a Freudian tendency to blame mothers. “Our beautiful Rosalie a duckling? I gave her a complex,” Molly moans, in an episode in which her daughter wants a nose job. Terrified that her “nag, nag, nag” has risked causing her “subconscious psyche” to “get a trauma,” Molly showers Rosalie with praise, then schemes with the plastic surgeon to get her daughter to change her mind. It’s a playful, twisty plot, but one overflowing with contradictions, not least the fact that Rosalie is played by McQuade, whose nose is a button. When Molly asks, again and again, “So what’s wrong with Rosalie’s nose?,” no one says, “It looks too Jewish”—in Haverville, some things couldn’t be said.
Berg never stopped working, always seeking fresh outlets for her talents. In 1959, she played a Russian mother whose son is dinged by antisemitic quotas in “The World of Sholom Aleichem,” a joyful independent television production directed by and cast with blacklisted artists, including Mostel. The same year, she broke through on Broadway, winning a Tony for “A Majority of One,” where she played a Jewish widow who has a romance with a Japanese man. In 1961, Berg got her last shot at television, in a show called “Mrs. G. Goes to College”—watery gruel, in which Berg played Sarah Green, a sort of magical Jewess among clean-cut coeds. That year, she published her memoir, “Molly and Me,” co-written with her son, Cherney, her frequent collaborator. In the book, she celebrates her standoff with Paley, but makes no mention of the blacklist. There is only one sentence about Loeb, who is described simply as “a veteran of Broadway and the movies.”
By this point, the space for a Molly Goldberg had narrowed, like a dress cut too small. The television industry was sexist and ageist; once “The Goldbergs” was gone, it was also resistant to anything that executives deemed “too Jewish.” As David Zurawik points out in the book “The Jews of Prime Time,” there wasn’t another explicitly Jewish main character on prime-time network television until 1972. Berg’s most beloved creation struck assimilated Jewish sophisticates as a corny throwback: the architect Frank Goldberg changed his name to Gehry because his wife hated the association.
Meanwhile, the Yiddishe mama had made a comeback, in a sinister new form. In the work of Jewish artists such as Woody Allen and Philip Roth, she was reduced to a punch line—and, worse, demoted to a walk-on. By the nineteen-sixties, Jewish women were rarely portrayed as protagonists, and, when they did show up, it was often as cruel stereotypes: the spoiled princess, the homely meeskite, the castrating mother. In 1965, America’s biggest nonfiction best-seller was a satirical self-help book by Dan Greenburg, “How to Be a Jewish Mother,” full of hacky gags. The last time Berg’s fans heard her voice, she was speaking Greenburg’s lines on the record album of the book. A Broadway adaptation of the book was in the works; after Berg’s death, from heart failure, in 1966, the Yiddish-theatre legend Molly Picon took the role.
I was searching for that album on Spotify when I stumbled across an interview that Berg had done shortly before she died, seemingly the only record of an interaction between the producer and her clearest historical peer, Lucille Ball. There had been a few other pioneering female showrunners, such as Peg Lynch, whose witty sitcom “Ethel and Albert” débuted on TV not long after “The Goldbergs.” But solidarity didn’t come easily in a culture that trained women to see one another as competition: Lynch, a stylish, younger go-getter from Minnesota, disliked Berg, who she felt had snubbed her at W.G.A. meetings, possibly because Lynch had stolen Berg’s TV director Walter Hart to oversee her show—or maybe because Lynch, who owned the rights to her show, saw no use for a union.
So I was excited to hear what Berg had to say to Ball, the genius comedienne who had triumphed in her wake. At the time of the interview, Ball was starring in her second sitcom, “The Lucy Show,” and, during breaks in production, recording breezy, brief episodes of a radio show called “Let’s Talk to Lucy,” in which she interviewed stars like Mitzi Gaynor. A few minutes in, Ball called her guest “Molly,” then caught her mistake, but Berg reassured her that everyone did that. “I scarcely know where one begins and the other ends,” she said. “It’s very gratifying to know that a character that you created thirty-two years ago still is alive, you see? That makes me very happy. She is a dear person, Molly.”
After some chat about Berg’s teen years at Fleischmanns, Lucy turned the talk, rather abruptly, to domestic life: “What does your home life consist of these days, Gertrude?” Berg described her love of travel, her trips to Los Angeles. She had a play in the works; a musical, too—a full slate, it felt like. But somehow the dialogue kept veering, compulsively, back to their roles as wives and mothers.
“There should be more discipline,” Berg said to Ball.
“Do you think that the husband should be absolute boss of the household?” Ball asked, encouragingly.
Berg answered in the affirmative: “I think that makes a tremendous difference.”
They were two of the wealthiest, most ingenious businesswomen in America. Berg had invented the family sitcom, almost single-handedly, on the cusp of the Great Depression, then translated it for the small screen; Ball had turned the genre into a juggernaut, helped shift the format’s production to Los Angeles, and innovated the rerun and the three-camera method. Each had played an iconic housewife, although Molly stood in fascinating contrast with Lucy Ricardo: the former was a fixer, the latter a firecracker, prone to fits of mischievous rage, then spanked into submission by her bandleader husband. Both women had survived the McCarthy era: in 1953, Ball had met with HUAC about her 1936 voter registration as a Communist, claiming she had done so to appease her socialist grandfather. (Her husband and co-star, Desi Arnaz, allegedly told their studio audience, “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that’s not legitimate.”)
None of those subjects made it into the conversation. Instead, Ball asked if Berg thought, as Ball herself did, that “a great many men have relinquished—not even reluctantly—but just sort of . . . let go of the reins.”
“Well, because the women have taken over!” Berg said. “Women are out there, career women, are out in the world—I think that has a great deal to do with it. Women are embarrassed when they say, ‘I’m just a hausfrau!’ ”
“They shouldn’t be!” Ball said.
“Certainly they shouldn’t be!” Berg said. “What is greater than the career of raising a family?”
Listening to the exchange made me feel uneasy, the way I often do lately. It felt like a performance, although it was hard to say for whom it was intended. Housewives who might resent their success? Men who controlled their industry? Each other? There’s history, and then there’s what’s missing from history—what got cut in the edit, suppressed from the conversation. Berg’s story faded for many reasons, including the fact that most episodes of her show didn’t air in reruns. Perhaps she simply died too young to be reclaimed by the next generation of women and celebrated as a role model.
But there was also the fact that, despite her remarkable accomplishments, Berg’s life couldn’t be easily packaged as a feel-good story—nostalgia for a more innocent time, the way fifties sitcoms were, decades later, treated as documentaries, their narrow portraits of the American family repurposed by conservatives as if they were a real, shared childhood memory. In her memoir, Berg had trimmed the worst bits out, and, as the decades passed, so did the people around her. And who could blame them? At the height of the blacklist, network executives had been cowardly; sponsors had folded without hesitation. It happens all the time, these days, everywhere you look: at universities, newspapers, law firms. Hard times don’t make easy history. But liberatory ideas, like the wind, blow everywhere. ♦