Between Two Goldbergs: The Semiotics of Yiddish on American Sitcoms

• In Event: 21st Century Yiddish Popular Culture: Quotations, Translations, Reverberations

Abstract

Yiddish has been integrated situational comedies since the advent of broadcast television in borrowings, grammatical constructions, and intonation. This talk examines Yiddish integration in two family sitcoms called the Goldbergs: the first, created by Gertrude Berg (1949-1956, CBS, NBC) and the second created by Adam F. Goldberg (2013-2023, ABC). I analyze the use of Yiddish within the Jewish linguistic repertoire of these shows to investigate the changing metalinguistic functions of Yiddish on comedy television. While much has been written about the sounds of Yiddish on specific comedy programs, notably Seinfeld, The Nanny, and the musical dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I situate my analysis of Yiddish within American sitcoms in a comparative framework. My theoretical framing brings together scholarly literature on the meanings of Yiddish (Glaser 2017, Shandler 2020, Avineri 2021, Margolis 2023); the linguistic repertoire of American Jewish English (Benor 2010, Burdin 2017), and the representation of Jews on television (e.g. Antler 2007, Tanny 2016, Caplan 2017, Branfman 2020, Pickette 2023).

My research questions are: how has Yiddish on popular television evolved as a marker of Jewish identity against the decline of the language as a vernacular in the mainstream, the silencing and subsequent reemergence of Jewish identity on network television, and changes to television platforms in the age of network and post-network television?

The original The Goldbergs starred Gertrude Berg as working-class Jewish immigrant matriarch Molly Goldberg an urban tenement in the Bronx. Yiddish is embedded the American English of the show’s characters, some of whom were played by actors from the Yiddish cinema. The second The Goldbergs is a period sitcom that follows a secular Jewish family in suburban Pennsylvania in the 1980s. Yiddish on The Goldbergs is primarily associated with show’s two grandfathers, Albert “Pops” Solomon (George Segal) and Murray Moshe Goldberg (Jeff Garlin), but is also deliberately invoked by their children and grandchildren. My paper proposes that Yiddish on the two Goldbergs operates as a barometer of ethnic Jewishness in three distinct contexts: the immigrant generation; the transitional generation of the 1980s, and the present.

Author

• Rebecca Margolis, ACJC - Monash University