Goldbergs, The

The Goldbergs was a humorous comedy series about a Jewish family in New York created by writer and comedienne Gertrude Berg, who also starred. The Goldbergs was one of the most successful situation comedy programs on radio, premiering on the NBC network on November 10, 1929, and running weekly for 20 years. In 1948, Berg created a Broadway play, Me and Molly, adapted from the radio comedy, which ran for two years, and in 1949 the CBS television network premiered The Goldbergs as a weekly series, which ran until 1955.

Gertrude Berg played the matriarch Molly in all of the show's incarnations and was also the major writer for both series, composing some 10,000 scripts over the years. The Goldbergs also appeared as a comic strip, originating in the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, one of the few American comic strips to feature Jewish characters. The Goldbergs was an important piece of American popular culture, a respectful and successful depiction of an ethnic family in a popular medium crowded with stereotypes, and one of the first sympathetic depictions of Jewish life in American broadcasting.

Set for most of its radio and television run in the Bronx, where the Goldbergs lived in apartment 3B at 1038 East Tremont, in a neighborhood where immigrant Jewish families often moved after achieving the first level of financial success in America, The Goldbergs opened with Molly talking to her neighbors from the window of the family's apartment. (Her greeting, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom,” became a well-known catchphrase.)

The Goldbergs was one of the first family situation comedies in American media, and the longest running before Lucille Ball's I Love Lucy. Unlike Ball's character, mother Molly was a resourceful anchor at the center of the family, a problem solver who helped not only her family but those of her neighbors in the community. Her family included husband Jake, who owned a clothing business (on radio, actors Himan Brown and James R. Waters; on television, Philip Loeb, Harold Stone, and Robert H. Harris), Molly's retired Uncle David (Menasha Skulnik and Eli Mintz), who helps run the household, son Sammy (Alfred Ryder; on television, Larry Robinson and Tom Taylor), and daughter Rosalie (Roslyn Silber; on television, Arlene McQuade).

For most of its run, the radio show ran for 15 minutes daily or thrice weekly, featuring [Page 978]serialized, continued story lines. The television adaptation began its run as a half-hour program on the CBS network; Berg received the first Emmy Award for Best Actress for this version in 1950. The show later moved to NBC, then the Dumont network, and finally Berg independently syndicated the show, becoming a pioneer in this form of distribution, ending in 1956.