Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (Review)

Aviva Kempner follows up her extremely popular documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg with another one about a Jewish-American whose impact on American popular culture was vast and deep in her lifetime but has since faded from popular consciousness. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg recounts — with amazing access to hard-to-find archival material — the career of Gertrude Berg, the actress, writer and producer who created the Molly Goldberg character for radio and television.

An optimistic, warm-hearted Jewish mother living in a crowded New York City apartment with her family, Molly Goldberg provided good-humored life lessons (and a Jewish role model) during the Depression, the rise of Nazism, the New Deal, World War II and the politically fearful 1950s. Leaning out her apartment window to yell to a neighbor, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom,” she was one of the nation’s most recognizable fictional figures — and Berg’s show The Goldbergs is considered television’s first sitcom. (She won the first Best Actress Emmy.)

This movie shows how Berg put together the show and how it drew on, but was very different from, her own life. It also shows what it meant to America, through interviews with such fans as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ed Asner and NPR’s Susan Stamberg, as well as surviving cast members and relatives.

The film also explores the dark side, when 1950s-era McCarthyites hounded cast member Philip Loeb off the show. Trying to help him, Berg asked for help from New York’s Cardinal Spellman — a friend of J. Edgar Hoover — and he responded with a suggestion straight out of the Spanish Inquisition: Convert to Catholicism first. Grade: A-

This article appears in Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2009.