Gertrude Berg was perhaps the only woman to attain authorial control of a prime-time network television series during the 1950s, serving as the creator, principal writer, and star of her own weekly situation comedy, The Goldbergs. When the show came to television, she was already thoroughly identified in the public mind with her lifelong dramatic persona, Molly Goldberg, a Jewish-American mother she had developed into a quintessential stereotype on a long-running radio series. Public familiarity with the Molly character tended to obscure her career as a remarkably prolific writer.

Berg began writing and performing skits at her father’s resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains, later studying playwriting at Columbia University. After selling several dramatic scripts to radio, her big break came in 1929 with the debut of her own series on NBC, The Rise of Goldbergs (later shortened to The Goldbergs). It was among the most popular programs of the radio era, often rivaling Amos ’n’ Andy, another NBC series based on racial stereotypes, at the top of the national ratings. Fifteen-minute episodes of The Goldbergs aired Monday through Friday, placing the form of the program somewhere between the contemporary parameters of situation comedy and daytime soap opera. Berg wrote most of the episodes, which, after a 20-year production run, numbered more than 5,000. A pioneer in product tie-in concepts, the writer-performer capitalized on the Molly Goldberg phenomenon with short stories, stage plays, a feature film, and even a cookbook.

The Goldbergs premiered on television as a CBS sitcom in 1949. During its five-season production run, the show would move around the dial to NBC, DuMont, and first-run syndication. A sentimentalized vision of melting-pot assimilation, The Goldbergs was “pure schmaltz,” a mythic idealization of the American dreams and aspirations of a lower-class Jewish family in the Bronx. The differences between traditional shtetl values and middle-American values are consistently exposed as merely stylistic. The older members of the family, including Molly, her husband Jake, and Uncle David, all speak with thick Yiddish accents, while Molly’s children, Rosalie and Sammy, sound more like the voices heard on Ozzie and Harriet. When it was becoming clear in the mid-1950s that ethnic sitcoms of this type were on the way out, Berg revamped the show by moving the family to the suburbs, renaming the series Molly (1954–55), and offering it in first-run syndication. These changes, however, could not save it.

For the next five years Berg was a frequent guest on comedy-variety shows, appearing with Perry Como, Kate Smith, Ed Sullivan, and others. She also played several dramatic roles on anthology showcases, such as The U.S. Steel Hour and The Alcoa Hour. In 1961 Berg attempted to return to situation comedy with Mrs. G Goes to College (also called The Gertrude Berg Show) on CBS. It was the first time she had appeared on series television as any character other than Molly Goldberg. The old assimilationist themes remained at the heart of Berg’s work; she played Sarah Green, an elderly widow pursuing the education denied her by a poverty-stricken youth. Once again, Jewish values and American values were portrayed as distinguishable only in matters of style.

Berg’s autobiography, Molly and Me, was published in 1961. Her papers, including many of her radio and television scripts, are collected at the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University. It is worth noting that Berg took a stand against the blacklist in 1951, refusing to fire her long-time costar Philip Loeb (he resigned to prevent the show’s cancellation and later committed suicide).