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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Tillie Edelstein was born in 1899 to Russian parents living in the polyglot, working-class New York neighborhood of East Harlem, amid large Jewish, Italian, and German immigrant populations. She was raised in a culturally hybrid household that spoke both English and Yiddish, the common language of Eastern European Jews. Her mother Dinah died while Tillie was young. Her father Jacob worked in a Manhattan candy factory in the fall and winter. In the spring and summer he managed Fleischmann’s, a small lodge in the Catskills.  

The Borscht Belt

Inns and boarding houses like Fleischmann’s offered accommodations for Jewish families seeking respite from the sweltering summer in the city. In the 1920s and ’30s, these farm-like retreats evolved into modest resorts with kosher kitchens,  family-style dining, and entertainment in an area of the Catskills that became known as the “Borscht Belt” – for the Eastern European beet soup often served at meals.  

They also became the breeding ground for a uniquely Jewish kind of entertainment and humor. 

In this incubator for Jewish singers, writers, and comedians, Tillie learned the rhythms of the stage.  She had no formal theatrical training, but she readily absorbed the cadences of Jewish-American life, and incorporated them into stories and sketches, drawing on themes of ethnic heritage, generational bonds, and maternal wisdom.

In 1929, Tillie Edelstein changed her name to Gertrude Berg, and wrote a radio script based on character sketches she had performed for patrons in the Catskills.  The central character was Molly Goldberg, a warm-but-meddlesome Jewish mother, and her family’s life in the Bronx – all based on Tillie-now-Gertrude’s experience growing up in East Harlem. 

Chutzpah

Although she had no background or training in broadcasting, Gertrude approached NBC with the concept.  

To say this was a bold move for an industry outsider—especially a woman in the 1920s—would greatly understate the chutzpah Gertrude had to muster.

But somehow her pitch resonated with the programming executives who heard it. 

On November 20, 1929 – just a few weeks after the Wall Street crash that triggered the Great Depression – The Rise of The Goldbergs premiered locally on WJZ, NBC’s flagship station in New York. 

By 1931, The Rise of the Goldbergs was broadcast from coast to coast on the NBC Blue Network^⁠1 with sponsorship from Pepsodent, a toothpaste famous for its minty flavor and the totally fabricated claim that it contained an ingredient called “Irium.”  

Gertrude Berg was the creator, writer, and producer of the show.  She wrote the first scripts by hand on legal pads, often while cooking or watching her children. She is believed to have written over 5,000 scripts over the show’s eventual long run. She managed production logistics, negotiated with sponsors, and insisted on retaining creative control—rare for anyone at the time, let alone a woman in a male-dominated industry.

More importantly, Gertrude voiced the role of Molly Goldberg herself.  Her warm, lyrical voice and endearing stories of a Bronx housewife with one foot in the Old World and the other in the New, found their way into living rooms across the country. 

At a time when Americans needed sources of comfort, The Rise of the Goldbergs became a staple of nightly radio, running for nearly two decades. In the mid-30s, as the family’s “rise” was firmly established, the name was shortened to just The Goldbergs, and offered a compelling look into Jewish immigrant life.  The Goldbergs reached millions of listeners with universal stories about family, sacrifice, ambition, assimilation, and love.  And Gertrude-as-Molly, with her lilting mix of Yiddishisms and motherly wisdom, was as recognizable in American households as Franklin Roosevelt’s voice or Jack Benny’s fiddle.

As The Goldbergs continued to run on radio throughout World War II, Gertrude remained loyal to NBC.  The show became one of the most beloved programs on the air, to the general benefit of brands like Pepsodent, Dr. Lyons Tooth Powder, and Sanka.  But the show went off the air between 1945 and 1948, in part due to sponsor disputes, but also because Berg had her eye on the new kid in town: television 

As the war was winding down, it was obvious to Gertrude that television was poised to become the next big thing, and she began exploring how she could adapt The Goldbergs.  Her primary goal  was to maintain full creative control over the transition.  She wrote a pilot and produced test episodes as early as 1946, envisioning The Goldbergs for television with the same warmth and humor that defined the radio show.

Despite her sincere loyalty and long history with  NBC, the network was hesitant to commit to a prime-time TV slot for The Goldbergs.  Network executives expressed doubt about the show’s footing in the new medium and harbored concerns about its ethnic appeal – despite more than a decade of radio success to the contrary. 

A New Network for TV

CBS, on the other hand, under the guidance of its founder and president William S. Paley (who was also Jewish), was aggressively building its television brand and looking to lure established talent from radio to TV. ^⁠2 Paley and programming executive Frank Stanton offered Berg everything she wanted:  a weekly evening time slot, all the money she needed for production, and creative control of the program. 

The television premiere of The Goldbergs – broadcast live from New York on CBS on February 7, 1949 – was a landmark occasion for several reasons:  It was  the first situation comedy on television, and the first to be centered on a Jewish-American family. Once again, Gertrude Berg not only starred as Molly, she also wrote and produced every episode, becoming a trailblazing role model for generations of women to come. 

Episodes of The Goldbergs typically opened with a line carried over from the radio version, when Molly leaned out her apartment window and called out to her neighbors, “Yoo hoo… is anybody there?” 

A Victim of the Red Scare

The Goldbergs was never formally “cancelled” in the modern sense, but its demise is attributed in part to one of the darkest chapters in early television history: the blacklisting of co-star Philip Loeb during the McCarthy era.

Phillip Loeb played Molly’s husband, Jake Goldberg.  When he was named in Red Channels – a red-baiting pamphlet that listed alleged Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry – big TV  sponsors like cereal maker General Mills pressured CBS to remove Loeb from the show. Gertrude resisted fiercely, even offering to forgo her own salary to keep Loeb in the cast, but the network caved in to sponsor pressure. Loeb left the show in 1952 under duress. His life unraveled, and he died by suicide in 1955.

The show lost momentum after his departure. Audience interest waned and The Goldbergs ended its run in syndication in 1956.

The Goldbergs’ faded from the cultural landscape, but Gertrude Berg remained a respected figure in American entertainment.  In 1959, she starred on Broadway in A Majority of One, a role that earned her a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. The show tackled themes of intercultural romance and postwar reconciliation between Americans and Japanese. She published her memoir, Molly and Me, in 1961, chronicling her life, the show, and her approach to storytelling. Though she made occasional guest appearances on television into the early 1960s, she never piloted another show of her own. 

When Gertrude Berg died in New York on September 14, 1966 – from heart failure at the age of 67 – she left behind a profound legacy as one of the first women to create, write, produce, and star in her own nationally broadcast show on either radio or television.

Some will credibly argue that The Goldbergs was not the first sitcom on television. Mary Kay and Johnny first aired on the DuMont network starting in 1947, two years earlier than The Goldbergs. Starring real-life couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns, their show centered on domestic life in a Manhattan apartment and is remembered as the first TV show to depict a married couple sleeping in the same bed. ^⁠3 It was also the first show to incorporate a real-life pregnancy into the storyline, when Mary Kay became pregnant with their son.

But Mary Kay and Johnny was created out of whole cloth for television, and did not have the pre-history or cultural consequence of The Goldbergs.

And, there were other comedy-oriented programs that made the transition from radio to television, like The Jack Benny Program in 1950, Burns and Allen in 1950, and Amos ‘n’ Andy in June 1951, But The Goldbergs was the first scripted domestic sitcom to make the jump from radio to television. 

Gertrude Berg – née Tillie Edelstein – arguably created one of the most enduring forms of entertainment in the world today, the family-based situation comedy or “sitcom.”  She helped define the format that shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and All in the Family would refine and expand in the decades that followed. 

In 1950, Gertrude Berg became the first woman to win an Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy – an accolade that acknowledged the more than two decades of vision, talent, and labor, she had poured into the uniquely comic borscht of The Goldbergs.

¹ At the time, NBC operated two networks: NBC Red carried the more commercial, high-profile lineup; NBC Blue featured more experimental and culturally focused programming. In 1943, antitrust pressure from the U.S. government compelled RCA to sell NBC Blue to Edward J. Noble, the millionaire owner of Life Savers candy and a radio entrepreneur, for $8 million. In 1945, the Blue Network was officially rebranded as the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).

² William S. “Bill” Paley was the heir to his family’s prosperous Philadelphia-based Congress Cigar Company. When the company began advertising on radio in the mid-1920s, Paley noted the boost in cigar sales and concluded that broadcasting, not cigars, was where his own future lay. With support from the family business, in 1928 Paley acquired the combined interests of the faltering United Independent Broadcasters and the Columbia Phonographic Company, renamed the network the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and began building a broadcasting empire rivaled only by NBC in its size, scope, and ambition.

³ For years married couples on TV slept in adjacent single beds – including Lucy and Desi on I Love Lucy – and even when Lucy was pregnant.

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