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Coming Feb. 17th …

image - MISCELLANEOUS Productions’ Jack Zipes Lecture screenshot

A FREE Facebook Watch Event: Resurrecting Dead Fairy Tales - Lecture and Q&A with Folklorist Jack Zipes

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image - A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project

A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project. Made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

screenshot - The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is scheduled to open soon.

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is scheduled to open soon.

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Byline: Robert Gluck JNS.ORG

Milton Berle inspired today’s comedians

Milton Berle inspired today’s comedians

Maury Wills, Milton Berle, Jimmy Piersall and Willie Mays in a salute to baseball on the television program The Hollywood Palace in 1967. (photo from ABC Television via Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s comedy superstars, especially those whose careers are driven by television, may very well owe their success to pioneering Jewish entertainer Milton Berle.

Born Mendel Berlinger in Manhattan in 1908, Berle became America’s first small-screen star. Aptly nicknamed “Mr. Television,” he influenced and helped promote the work of hundreds of younger comics.

photo - A 1943 publicity photo of Milton Berle
A 1943 publicity photo of Milton Berle. (photo from EBay via Wikimedia Commons)

“Milton Berle was deceptively successful and very Jewish,” said Lawrence Epstein, author of The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America, published in 2002, the year Berle died. “His success came about because early television sets were mostly sold in wealthier urban areas, with Jews and gentile urbanites accustomed to and appreciative of Jewish humor. So, Berle’s quick talking, his high-speed jokes, his dressing in outlandish costumes and his sprinkling of Yiddishisms all played well. Ironically, it was Berle’s success with those urban audiences that propelled the sales of televisions around the nation.”

Epstein explained that once televisions reached the rural areas of America, viewers “took a look at [Berle] and said he spoke so fast they couldn’t understand him, and that he wasn’t funny, and [they asked], ‘What was that foreign language?’”

He said, “That is why Berle’s television career was meteoric. It burned brightly but briefly.”

Berle’s close friend Lou Zigman, a Los Angeles-based labor lawyer and Brooklyn native, disagrees with Epstein’s use of the word “meteoric,” arguing that Berle never burned out like a meteor does. Berle kept performing, assisting other comics, giving to charities and spreading Jewish culture until his death, and he was even performing card tricks as a hospital patient at age 90, according to Zigman.

“I asked Milton how come all the gentiles knew Yiddish humor,” Zigman said in an interview. “He answered that the great majority of comedians and writers in those early years were Jewish. That’s why it spread, and our culture spread, all over the country.”

At age 5, Berle won an amateur talent contest and appeared as a child actor in silent films. He became a vaudevillian at age 12 in a revival of the musical comedy Florodora in Atlantic City, N.J., and was hired by producer Jack White in 1933 to star in Poppin’ the Cork, a musical comedy concerning the repealing of Prohibition. From 1934-36, Berle was heard frequently on The Rudy Vallee Hour radio show and attracted publicity as a regular on The Gillette Original Community Sing, a Sunday night comedy-variety radio program broadcast on CBS. Then came the Milton Berle Show, a variety format he would revive for his television debut.

Read more at jns.org.

Format ImagePosted on September 5, 2014September 3, 2014Author Robert Gluck JNS.ORGCategories TV & FilmTags Lawrence Epstein, Lou Zigman, Milton Berle, Mr. Television
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos finds new life

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos finds new life

Carl Sagan with Viking. (photo by Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Carl Sagan fans old and new have been gazing at their televisions in awe as host Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson’s resurrection of the science epic Cosmos takes them on a journey from the Big Bang, to microscopic one-celled organisms, to the ascent of man, to beyond the stars and planets. The return of Cosmos – which launched in March and runs for 13 episodes on the Fox network, ending June 2 – provides an opportune time to remember Sagan, the show’s Jewish creator.

An American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author, Sagan was born to into a family of Reform Jews. According to science writer William Poundstone, author of Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, Sagan’s family celebrated the High Holidays and his parents made sure that he knew Jewish traditions.

“Both of his parents instilled in him this drive to get ahead in America, and that is something he kept all his life,” said Poundstone in an interview. “It may have been one factor in this idea that he not only wanted to be a successful astronomer, but [also] to write books, to become a celebrity and an entrepreneur. His mother particularly instilled that in him.”

Read more at jns.org.

Format ImagePosted on April 25, 2014August 27, 2014Author Robert Gluck JNS.ORGCategories TV & FilmTags A Life in the Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Neil Degrasse Tyson
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