Jewish Themes in Star Trek

By Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

Rabbi Gershom takes you where no rabbi has gone before! You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this well-researched and reader-friendly journey into Jewish themes, actors, writers, in-jokes and subtexts in the Star Trek Universe. Inspired by a class he taught at the Minneapolis Talmud Torah, the book explores such things as:
The Jewish origin of the Vulcan salute; How Vulcan culture is based on rabbinical Judaism;
"Who is a Jew" among Trek characters in episodes, movies and the novels; How Talmudic logic helped expand the Star Trek universe; Why Ferengi values are NOT Jewish values -- and much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458397683

Book preview

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Books by Yonassan Gershom

49 Gates of Light

Beyond the Ashes

From Ashes to Healing

Jewish Tales of Reincarnation

Eight Candles of Consciousness

Are Holocaust Victims Returning?

Jewish Themes in Star Trek

Works in progress:

Notes from a Jewish Naturalist

Allergic to the Light

Who Stole My Religion?

(with Dr. Richard Schwartz)

Jewish Themes in Star Trek

Where no rabbi has gone before!

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

Disclaimer: This book is a work of independent literary criticism. The opinions expressed within it are entirely those of the author, and do not represent Paramount Pictures, CBS, or any person or entity connected to or involved with creating or marketing the franchise known as Star Trek.

SECOND PRINTING

©2009 by Yonassan Gershom

All rights reserved

Published by Lulu Press, Inc.

9781458397683

Also available in hardcover at

www.lulu.com

Cover photo: Nebula NGC1818, courtesy of NASA Hubble team

Cover design by Yonassan Gershom

e9781458397683_i0002.jpg

Dedicated to the memory of

Ilan Ramon

the first Israeli astronaut in space,

and his six brave crewmates,

who perished aboard the space shuttle

Columbia on February 1, 2003.

May their courage continue to inspire us

to explore strange new worlds.

Author’ Preface

Why Jewish themes in Star Trek? Isn’t Star Treka supposed to be universal? Well, yes and no. Star Trek presents a multicultural model of the future -- a future that, I have always assumed, will include Jews. And indeed there have been some characters in the series named Kaplan, Kelowitz, and Ginsberg, who could certainly be Jewish. If so, they are probably secular or cultural Jews, whose Jewishness is a matter of ancestry, rather than a belief system. Religion, after all, was never a part of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future.

Still, the question remains: Does the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC -- Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations -- include room for a religious Jew like myself? This book is the result of my quest to find out.

The project started out simple enough: I would compile a list of possibly Jewish characters and references in the episodes. I would also look for references and dialogue that might be seen as having a Jewish twist. I began my research the lazy way, by posting requests in various Internet discussion groups. In reply, I received tons of emails supporting the project, but very few actual references – not even the ones I had already found!

Far from discouraging me, this only confirmed what I had suspected: I was going where no rabbi had gone before. If there were Jewish references in Star Trek, I would have to dig for them myself.

In addition to viewing all the episodes and movies, I tracked down and read every Star Trek novel published between 1970 and 1990 -- a delightful task that took me over three years. (My reason for the 1990 cut-off point is explained in Appendix B). I fell in love with the books, which provided so much more detail about the characters and alien cultures than the show itself. Television writers are severely limited by what can be shown on screen within the limits of a studio budget and the time frame of a one-hour production (really about 45 minutes or less with commercials). A novel, on the other hand, is hundreds of pages long, and is limited only by the author’s imagination. Space aliens that would appear utterly ridiculous on TV can be quite believable on the written page. A novel also allows the reader to spend many hours immersed in the story.

During those three years, my recreational reading consisted almost entirely of Star Trek novels. Although current critiques of Star Trek tend to follow the lead of Paramount Studios and ignore the novels as apocryphal, I have unabashedly included them here. Maybe that’s because I found so many Jewish references in the early novels. Or maybe it’s because I’m a writer myself.

In addition to the novels, I also watched or read dozens of reviews, documentaries, biographies, interviews, articles, fanzines, blogs, websites, critical commentaries and academic works on the Star Trek universe. My book and video collection now takes up an entire wall and continues to grow.

Somewhere along the line, I discovered the 1973 Animated Series. Before doing this project, I had no idea those episodes even existed. What can I say? The Animated Series originally aired on the Sabbath, when religious Jews don’t watch TV. Saturday morning cartoons just aren’t part of my culture. The discovery of these 22 lost episodes cleared up a big mystery about the origins of certain new crewmembers in the early novels, such as three-legged Arex and felinoid M’ress.

What had begun as a simple list of characters soon evolved into a full-blown project, probably equivalent to writing a Ph.D. thesis. And yet, in spite of all the academic research involved, this remains a very personal book, written from my own perspective as a longtime fan. I do cite my sources where appropriate, but the conclusions are entirely mine. So are any bloopers that may lurk within its pages.

One of the best things about Star Trek is that it makes a wonderful mirror, allowing each of us to see ourselves reflected in it. Therefore, rather than try to interview certain cast and production crew members about how their own Jewishness might have affected the show, I simply allowed the material itself to speak to me as a Jew. Interestingly, the episodes that speak most eloquently are often the same ones that other Trekkers dismiss as hokey. I believe this is because my fellow fans are missing out on the Jewish subtexts.

In Appendix B you will find an essay called The Torah of Star Trek, which explains how I organized and interpreted the material. Fellow Jews with some Talmudic training will no doubt recognize (and perhaps smile at) my methodology. For the rest of my readers, I hope that this essay will serve to explain how Jews relate to source texts, how they are expanded to fill in details, and how the midrashic thought process might have influenced -- however unintentionally – the ongoing development of the Star Trek universe. Trek is, after all, the only TV series that developed a universe in this way.

My research project was almost finished when several new Trek novels appeared with – big drum roll -- major Jewish characters! Although these stories were published outside the time frame that I chose for my study of the novels, they represent a major breakthrough and deserve to be included. (See Appendix A.)

One list I resisted making was Who is a Jew among the Star Trek cast, writers, and production staff. Where I identify someone as Jewish, this is based on their own public statements. As for the rest, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify them all.

Like all books, this one had input from many people, some of whom I’ve never met. I especially want to thank Leonard Nimoy for making Spock so wonderfully Jewish; Diane Duane for inventing that great Jewish character in her novels, Harb Tanzer; Isaac Asimov (may he rest in peace) for influencing my writing style even though we are light-years apart in theology; the Minicon 30 science fiction convention (Minneapolis, 1995), where I presented my first Jews in Trek discussion; the Trek-cochavim (that’s Hebrew for Star Trek) Internet group, where I lurked and listened; the Intellec and FidoNet Star Trek BBS groups, where I hotly participated during the 1980s; Gershon Lefkowitz and the FCI study group in the 1990s (even though Gershon absolutely hated my analysis of the Nazi episode); Alan Berger, friend and avid Trekker, who took me to conventions and helped support my work financially; Matthew Epstein, eccentric poet and longtime friend who has supported my work in many ways over the years; Andrew Nussbaum, for sending me several articles on Jews and the Ferengi; LaDene Morton, for her delightful email correspondence about how the Ishmael Trek novel is based on the Here Come the Brides show; Kate Gladstone, for alerting me to Saavik’s Yiddish line in Star Trek III (see page 201) and helping me solve the Adonais mystery (page 130); Jim Baldwin, for his piece on Nutmeggers and the Ferengi, quoted in chapter 11; Jane Strauss, for many years of listening to me blather; the many, many creators of Memory-Alpha.org, the best Trek reference site on the Net; and Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis -- for obvious reasons.

Last but not least, much behind-the-scenes credit goes to Caryl, my beloved wife of 29 years, who has viewed every episode countless times with me, put up with me vanishing into my writer’s cubbyhole for days on end, and happily shared my love of Star Trek.

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

P.S. When I searched the NASA gallery for a cover image, I didn’t really look at the titles until I found the one I liked. Then I saw it was a photo of Nebula NGC1818 – double chai – could there be a better sign that the time is right for this book?

Table of Contents

Books by Yonassan Gershom

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Author’ Preface

Chapter 1: - In the Beginning...

Chapter 2: - Great Bird of the Galaxy

Chapter 3: - Who are the Jews?

Chapter 4: - Live Long and Prosper

Chapter 5: - Pointed Ears and Jewish Noses

Chapter 6: - Patterns of Force

Chapter 7: - Vulcans, Romulans, and Israelis

Chapter 8: - The Great Triad – Kirk, Spock, and McCoy

Chapter 9: - From Generation to Generation

Chapter 10: - Between Two Worlds

Chapter 11: - Ferengis are Us???

Chapter 12: - Assimilate This!!!

Chapter 13: - The God Thing

Chapter 14: - The Good and Evil Within

Chapter 15: - The Quest for Eden

Conclusion: - The Journey Continues

Appendix A: - Vulcan’s Forge and Well of Souls

Appendix B: - The Torah of Star Trek

Appendix C: - Jewish References in TOS Trek

Endnotes

Bibliography

List of Photo and Graphics Credits

Star Trek XI: A Vulcan Holocaust?

About the Author

Chapter 1:

In the Beginning...

"Turn the Torah over and over, because everything is in

it."

(Rabbi ben BagBag, Talmud, Pirkei Avot)

It all started when I was hired to teach Hebrew to a group of high school students with no real interest in the subject. They were, shall we say, severely foreign-languageimpaired. Many of them had difficulty with English grammar, let alone Hebrew. The only reason they were in the class at all was because a certain Jewish summer camp required Hebrew in order to get in. The kids wanted to go to camp, their parents expected the school to pass them, and the school always did. An academic farce? Indeed. The kids were just serving time, and they knew it -- which didn’t make for much of a learning experience.

The logical thing would have been to waive the Hebrew requirement for these particular students. But who ever said the Humanb race is logical? So the school decided to try an experiment. They would offer an alternative class that could be counted toward the Hebrew requirement without actually having to learn much Hebrew. That was how I, a Hasidic storyteller in skullcap, beard and sidecurls, ended up teaching at a non-Orthodox Jewish school. On the first day of class, the students stared at me as if I had just arrived from another planet.

What might have been a total disaster was saved by the fact that I was given carte blanche to write my own curriculum. I soon discovered that many of these so-called problem students were really right-brain learners. Hebrew texts didn’t work for them, but hands-on experience did. Taking that as my cue, I came up with a course that used storytelling as a medium for teaching Jewish culture and moral values. In the process, I introduced some common Hebrew words and ritual terms.

So nu, what does all this have to do with Star Trek? Hang in there, it’s coming. What kind of a Jew would I be, if I didn’t give you the whole megillah?

Many Jewish stories, especially those from the Hasidic tradition, include a concept called k’fitzat ha-derech (k’FEETSAHT-HA-DER-EKH, literally the jumping of the road), which refers to the ability of miracle-working rabbis to instantly transport themselves from one place to another.¹ The Orthodox and Hasidic Jews believe this to be a genuine spiritual gift, acquired through mystical techniques similar to shamanism. The more modernized Reform and secular Jews see k’fitzat ha-derech as a literary device, used to explain how a character in a story could travel 500 miles overnight by horse and wagon. My storytelling class was definitely of the latter opinion.

You’ve got to be kidding, jeered one student. "These are fairy tales. You don’t expect us to believe them, do you?"

Well, I replied in a carefully neutral voice, they might be fairy tales to you, but many Hasidim do believe them.

So what? interrupted another student. The Hasidim are a just bunch of superstitious idiots. We’re modern Jews, rabbi, we’re scientific. We don’t believe in all that [expletive deleted] miracle stuff.

There was an awkward silence, as the class took in the fact that a student had just called the teacher a superstitious idiot. Then came a quite, thoughtful voice from the back of the room: "Maybe they just beamed them there."

Suddenly the class came alive. Wonder-working rabbis might be fairy tales, but beaming was something scientific they could all relate to and accept. Across the enormous chasm between the Hasidic and Reform worldviews, Star Trek had provided a bridge.

For the rest of the semester, our discussions were peppered with questions like: Was Ezekiel’s Chariot a UFO? Does the Book of Genesis describe the Big Bang? Did the Prophet Elijah beam up to a starship in heaven? And was all this beaming really any more scientifically possible than the jumping of the road? These class discussions weren’t standard Jewish theology, but they sure held the students’ attention! Needless to say, everyone passed and went to summer camp. And I went on to write this book.

Like many American Jews of my generation, I loved the adventures of Captain Kirk back in the 1960s, and I still enjoy the re-runs. However, this class was the first time that I consciously thought about Star Trek in terms of my Jewish identity. Once I began doing that, I saw dozens of connections between Torah values and Star Trek. I also gained a deeper insight into why I liked The Original Series so much. For one thing, the show’s oft-repeated message about false gods fit right in with the values of Abraham and Moses. Just as the biblical prophets decried the worship of lifeless idols, so, too, did Star Trek rail against despotic deities that turned out to be nothing more than malfunctioning computers.

My storytelling course at the Jewish school was short-lived (I only taught it once), but the long-term impact was profound. Several former students have told me how it got them thinking about religion in new and positive ways. For one young man, the class sparked enough interest to send him to seminary. On my end, I began keeping a list of Jewish references in Star Trek episodes, movies, and novels.

Not long after the class ended, I came across a used copy of Wandering Stars, a 1974 anthology of Jewish science fiction, edited by Jack Dann. Billed on the inside flap as the first time in science fiction that the Jew will appear without a mask, it was a wonderful find. In Isaac Asimov’s candid introduction to the book, I learned that such well-known writers as Harlan Ellison, William Tenn, Clyde Crane Campbell and even Jack Dann himself were all Jewish!

Why hadn’t I realized this before? Because, with the exception of Isaac Asimov, those early SF writers were all using Gentile-sounding pennames. Wandering Stars represented their coming out as Jews in the science-fiction world.

Some of the stories in Wandering Stars dated back to the 1930s and ‘40s when, as Asimov explained, Science fiction dealt entirely with Americans of northwest-European extraction who fought Homeric battles with space pirates, outer-world monsters, and evil wizards… A story entitled ‘War-Gods of the Oyster-Men of Deneb’ didn’t carry conviction if it was written by someone named Chaim Itzkowitz.² That’s a polite way of saying that antisemitism in the first half of the 20th century prevented many Jews from getting published unless they could pass for Gentiles. Consider the fact that it took until 1974 for a Jewish SF anthology to appear at all, and you get the picture.

Back then, I loved Wandering Stars. Like a thirsty man in the desert, I was delighted to find anything Jewish in the SF genre. Today, as I re-read those same stories, I realize how limited their future vision was. Most of the writers still saw Jewishness as defined by persecution and ostracism. In William Tenn’s tale, On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi, a group of Jewish Bulbas (a non-humanoid race) are finally accepted into the galactic Jewish community because they have been treated like Jews on their home planet. That is, they were persecuted by the non-Jewish Bulbas. Sure, it’s a great story, written in a rambling folk idiom reminiscent of the Yiddish satirist, Sholom Aleichem. On Venus still gives me a chuckle every time I read it. Still, it’s not the future I envision for my people.

Does Star Trek do any better? On the one hand, there are no persecuted Jews in Starfleet. But on the other hand, are there any Jews at all?

When I first began this book, I posted queries on several Star Trek Internet groups, asking for input about Jewish themes and characters. That drew a blank. I was repeatedly told that there is no such thing, because Star Trek is not about religion. One perplexed fan emailed back, Could you please give an example of what you mean by ‘Jewish themes in Star Trek?’ I have watched Star Trek since I was young and have never seen one single episode that had anything Jewish about it.

But is this accurate? True, there is no Jewish regular on the bridge. However, The Original Series did feature two security officers named Kaplan and Kelowitz, a science officer named Masada, and a mad psychiatrist who quoted the first-century Talmudic sage, Rabbi Hillel, although not by name.³ Various Kaplans continued to crop up in The Next Generation.

When Alan Dean Foster novelized the 1973 animated episodes, he frequently expanded the stories, in order to fill in more details about the characters (as well as make a whole book out of a half-hour cartoon.) In The Ambergis Element, one of his extra scenes includes a reference to a well-known Jewish game. M’ress, the felinoid crewmember, is reminiscing about her days in Starfleet Academy. She tells how she and her Human roommate, Lena Goldblum, used to spin a dreydel (spelled dredel in the book) to decide who goes first on a computer program. A dreydel is a four-sided Jewish top with Hebrew letters on the sides, traditionally associated with Hanukkah. Gimmel, I win! laughs M’Ress on page 5. Gimmel is the winning Hebrew letter in a game of dreydel.

Later novelists continued to expand the Star Trek universe. Not only did they create new races of aliens, they introduced us to characters like Yiddish-speaking Harb Tanzer,⁴ Security Chief Yael Rabinowich,⁵ and Doctor Saul Weinstein on the planet Centaurus.⁶ Even Doctor McCoy picked up a few Yiddish expressions from his old Jewish babysitter, including noshing (snacking) and What am I, chopped liver?⁷

The more I delved into Trek lore, the more Jewish references I found. Why wasn’t anybody else seeing this?

Then, in 1991, Hadassah magazine ran a five-page feature article entitled Is Star Trek Jewish? by Sheldon Teitelbaum. ⁸ Intended as a tribute to Star Trek’s 25th anniversary, the article covered lots of material on Jewish writers, actors, producers, technicians and others who had contributed to the series. True, executive producer Gene Roddenberry was a Gentile humanist who, according to Teitelbaum, rejected any contention that Star Trek reflects an American Jewish sensibility. On the other hand, the production staff, which brought his vision to the screen, was filled with Jews. Roddenberry might have come up with the original concept, but it was Jewish producers like Herb Solow, Harve Bennett (who was born Chaim Fishman),⁹ Bob Justman and Rick Berman who were at the day-to-day helm of the Enterprise. Even the world famous Vulcan salute was invented by a Jewish actor, Leonard Nimoy.

Addressing a Jewish audience in Montreal in 2008, Nimoy admitted that he drew a lot more from his Jewish background than just the Vulcan salute. People often ask if Judaism was part of Star Trek, he said. "The answer is definitely yes. Education is a Jewish value, and all of the members of the Starship Enterprise were highly educated, and so are individual dignity and social justice, which were a big deal in Star Trek. As a Jew, I had a strong sense of comfort with the series. I felt at home." He also felt Spock added neshamah (soul) to Trek.¹⁰

I am reminded of an old Middle Eastern legend, shared by Arabs and Jews alike, about a trickster figure named Nasrudin (pronounced nass-roo-DEEN). Once a week, so the story goes, Nasrudin would show up at the border with 10 donkey loads of cheap merchandise, all carefully labeled and inventoried. The customs inspector always suspected Nasrudin of smuggling, but each time he checked the loads against the list, everything was totally in order. So, the inspector had no choice but to let him through.

Years later, when the customs inspector had retired, he met up with Nasrudin in the local coffeehouse. As they sat reminiscing together, the conversation turned to the donkey caravans. I’m retired now, the old inspector told Nasrudin, and I’m not going to turn you in. But I’ve been dying to know all these years -- just what were you smuggling?

Nasrudin smiled. It’s really quite simple, he replied. I was smuggling donkeys.

Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, Nasrudin’s donkeys were invisible precisely because they were right there in plain sight. The same could be said for the Jewishness of Star Trek. In spite of the fact that Gene Roddenberry had officially banned organized religion from the series, a lot of Jewish material got through anyway, for the simple reason that Gene did not recognize it as something Jewish. So successful was this literary donkey smuggling, that many Trekkers today still don’t pick up on the many social references and in-jokes that clearly come from the Jewish experience. In the following chapters, I’ll let you in on some of these little secrets. So nu -- enjoy!

Chapter 2:

Great Bird of the Galaxy

"As a storyteller, Roddenberry became his own greatest

creation. While it is true that Gene Roddenberry made

Star Trek, it’s even more true that Star Trek made Gene

Roddenberry."

(Joel Engel, Gene Roddenberry: The

Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek)

According to legend, the Star Trek saga begins with the genius of a single man: Eugene Roddenberry, creator and executive producer of The Original Series (known as TOS to Trekkers, and not to be confused with the Internet term, Terms of Service, also abbreviated as TOS.) In his day-to-day life, Roddenberry preferred to be called Gene. To his fans, he was The Great Bird of the Galaxy, or Great Bird for short.

The god-like nickname started out as a joke. In the first Star Trek episode, The Man Trap, Sulu thanks Yeoman Rand for bringing him lunch, saying, May the Great Bird of the Galaxy smile upon your planet. People soon picked up on that line and applied it to Roddenberry. Not that anyone really thought Gene was a god, heaven forbid. But the Star Trek universe was indeed his creation. He envisioned it, he formed it, he breathed life into it. . . or so the story goes. As it turns out, things didn’t happen quite that way.

Like so many other Trekkers, I had assumed that the Great Bird single-handedly designed every detail of his show. In spite of the fact that numerous other names appeared weekly on the list of credits, it somehow never penetrated my thick skull that these people also had a profound effect on the series. Why not? Because, until I began researching this book, I was unfamiliar with how television writing works. In my own literary projects, I work alone, tracking down all the details that eventually become my next book. Sure, the publisher will have eventually have some input, but the brunt of the work, including any rewrites, is all mine. Naturally, I had always assumed that Roddenberry used a similar creative process.

Television production, however, is a very different bird (if you’ll pardon the pun). Once a writer submits a story, it goes through many hands before it finally hits the screen. The original pitch may be only one sentence, such as: "Fuzzy alien pets reproduce