I’m embarrassed to confess that I had no idea who Gertrude Berg was before I watched You-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, an enlightening if somewhat stock documentary from director Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg). A radio and television pioneer, Berg enjoyed a long career playing signature character Molly Goldberg, a stereotype-shattering Jewish matriarch who maintained a decades-long run in the public eye. Berg starred in and wrote every episode of the radio and TV incarnations of The Goldbergs (and we’re talking thousands of shows), in the process inventing the sitcom and many of the tropes we find commonplace today.
Read more of Joe Bardi's review after the jump …
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.
