Tag Archives: Radio

Jew of the Week: Gertrude Berg

America’s Jewish Mother

Gertrude Berg as "America's Jewish mother" Molly Goldberg

Gertrude Berg as “America’s Jewish mother” Molly Goldberg

Tilly Edelstein (1898-1966) was born in Harlem, a grandaughter of Jewish-Russian immigrants from Poland. Her parents ran a boarding house, where Tilly grew up entertaining the guests on a regular basis (and where she met her husband Lewis Berg). In 1929, Tilly wrote a short and humourous radio skit about a Jewish family in New York (based loosely on her own family). NBC considered her manuscript, but the radio executive couldn’t understand her writing, so Berg acted it out for him. Not only did NBC pick up her show, but they made an agreement that she would be its lead actress. Thus was born The Rise of the Goldbergs, an instant hit that ran over 5000 episodes, all of which were hand-written by Berg herself. In 1948, it was adapted as a Broadway musical, and in 1949 to a television show called The Goldbergs, which many consider to be America’s first sit-com. It is also credited with stemming the tide of anti-Semitism in the U.S., and bridging the gap between Jews and Gentiles. Starting out with a salary of $75 per week, Gertrude was earning $2000 a week just two years later – at the height of the Great Depression! Berg was beloved across America, and would later star in many other movies and television shows, winning Emmy and Tony Awards along the way. She was also a noted songwriter and Hollywood screenwriter. Sadly, she passed away of a heart attack in the midst of filming her latest movie. The New York Times reported: “Gertrude Berg was a writer and actress who brought out the humanity, love and respect that people should have toward each other. Her contributions to American radio, television, films and stage will always be remembered…”

Words of the Week

Every Jew, man or woman, possesses enough moral and spiritual strength to influence friends and acquaintances, and bring them into the light.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, The Lubavitcher Rebbe (Hayom Yom, Cheshvan 5)

Jew of the Week: Ruth Westheimer

Dr. Ruth

Dr. Ruth: Beloved Therapist, Deadly Sniper

Karola Ruth Siegel was born in Germany to an Orthodox Jewish family. Orphaned by the Holocaust, she migrated to Israel at 17 and joined the Haganah defence force, fighting in the 1948 War of Independence as a sniper (“For some strange reason,” she says, “I can put five bullets into that red thing in the middle of the target.”) After recovering from injuries sustained by a nearby exploding shell, Ruth studied psychology at the University of Paris. From there she immigrated to the U.S., receiving a PhD in human sexuality. In 1980, she was invited to do a 15-minute radio segment discussing sex. That transformed into one of the most popular radio shows of all time, featuring “Dr. Ruth”, which quickly became a household name. Later a television program, Dr. Ruth remains the most well-known sex therapist in America. She wrote several popular books on the subject, taught at Princeton and Yale, won a Leo Baeck Medal for humanitarian work, and still belongs to two Manhattan synagogues.

Words of the Week

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.
Francis Crick, Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of DNA structure

Jews of the Week: Martin Cooper and Joel Engel

Inventing the Cellphone

Cellphone Inventor

Martin Cooper & DynaTAC

Though many people were involved in the production of the cellphone, credit is given to Martin Cooper (b. 1928), nicknamed the “father of the cellphone”, who made the first cellular phone call in New York on April 3, 1973. Cooper was the executive of Motorola, and placed the first-ever cellphone call to his major competitor Joel S. Engel (b. 1936), a fellow Jew who was also working on cellphone technology. Engel participated in the Apollo space program and worked for AT&T before becoming the research head at Bell Labs, where he had previously co-led the team that developed “the architecture of the cellular network and its parameterization”. Meanwhile, Martin Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukranian-Jewish immigrants. Besides the cellphone, he had many more contributions to radio and communications technology, including “Cooper’s Law”, named in his honour. He went on to become Vice-President and Corporate Director at Motorola, which opened its first branch outside the U.S. in Israel. Their first phone was the DynaTAC, which weighed 1 kilogram and cost $9,000 (adjusting for inflation). Cooper described it as such: “The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.” He said that his inspiration for the cellphone came from Captain Kirk’s Communicator device on Star Trek!

Words of the Week

Joel Engel

We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.

– Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah