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Berg herself popped up again in the short-lived sitcom Mrs. G. Goes to College (retitled The Gertrude Berg Show, 1961–1962). In general, however, Jewish representation in episodic television receded markedly until the intermarriage-comedy Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–1973). A Jewish woman wouldn’t take center stage again until Ida’s daughter Rhoda Morgenstern (played by Valerie Harper), who appeared in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1974) and starred in Rhoda. Rhoda, who grew up in the Bronx before moving to Minneapolis (where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set) figured as the earthy, comically displaced foil to WASP protagonist Mary Richards (played by Moore). When Rhoda was transformed into the title character of the eponymous spin-off series, a new comic foil – Rhoda’s younger sister Brenda (played by Julie Kavner) – was introduced. Brenda took up what had been Rhoda’s comic trope of self-deprecation, centered on insecurity about her physical appearance and frustration with her love life.

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The complexities of identifying a person or a character as Jewish in the modern world have further complicated the range of portraits of Jewish women on American television. Given that the signs of Jewishness in American culture are anything but simple or consistent, and that there is no consensus as to what these markers are, an examination of the presence of Jewish women on American television must also consider figures who are oblique, cryptic, even absent. This is particularly important given that the majority of American television’s portraits of Jewish women, at least until the 1990s, were the work of male writers, directors, and creators/showrunners. Therefore, with notable exceptions such as Berg and Diamond, co-executive producer Charlotte Brown and writer Treva Silverman on Rhoda, Roseanne Barr, The Nanny’s Fran Drescher, and Dream On and Friends (1994–2004) co-creator Marta Kauffmann, much of the medium’s representation of Jewish women must be read as the visions of men (who are often Jewish).

For example, one of the most memorable discussions of Jewish women in television—a 1970 installment of The David Susskind Show (1958–1986) devoted to the topic of Jewish mothers—featured the observations of comedians Mel Brooks, Dan Greenburg, and David Steinberg, along with other men, but no women. One of the most popular portraits of a Jewish woman on American television in the mid-1990s was the character of Linda Richman (who made the Yiddish term farklemt something of an American household word), created and performed by comedian Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live.

Another complicating factor in attributing Jewishness to women (and men) in American television is the frequent disparity between the Jewish identity of the characters and of the actors who perform them. Among the Jewish female characters in continuing series played by non-Jewish performers have been Rhoda and Ida Morgenstern (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda), played by Valerie Harper and Nancy Walker; Phyllis Silver (the mother on Brooklyn Bridge, 1991–1993), played by Amy Aquino; Monica Geller and Rachel Green (Friends), played by Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston; Dharma Finkelstein (Dharma and Greg, 1997–2001), played by Jenna Elfman; Billie Frank (Rude Awakening, 1998–2001), played by Sherilyn Fenn; Lucille Bluth (Arrested Development), played by Jessica Walter; the Pfefferman daughters Ali and Sarah, and Rabbi Raquel Fein (Transparent), played by Gaby Hoffman, Amy Landecker, and Kathryn Hahn; Beverly Goldberg (The Goldbergs, later version), played by Wendi McClendon-Covey; and Miriam and her mother Rose (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), played by Rachel Brosnahan and Marin Hinkle. This common code-switching suggests that Jewishness is not regarded as an innate identity, but a performative one that can be realized (through accent, gesture, etc.) by non-Jews as easily as by Jews.

Conversely, Jewish actors frequently portray characters identified as non-Jews. In some instances, such as Elaine Benes (Seinfeld, 1990–1998), played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus; Dorothy Zbornak and Sophia Petrillo (The Golden Girls), played by Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty; Simka Gravas (Taxi), played by Carol Kane, these characters are often understood by some viewers as “crypto-Jews”—that is, characters who, while nominally identified as having some other ethnicity or religion, are nonetheless regarded as Jews in disguise. They are regarded as such not only by virtue of the performer’s identity, but also because of character attributes (such as being aggressive, neurotic, clever, or talkative) understood as signs of female Jewish behavior. This phenomenon suggests a larger sense of ethnic relativism distinctive to American culture.

Of special interest along the spectrum of Jewish women on American television is their strategic absence as characters, particularly in Jewish/non-Jewish intermarriages or romances in which Jewish men have been coupled disproportionately with shiksas (Yiddish for non-Jewish women). This gender-biased configuration had been established earlier in Broadway plays (notably Abie’s Irish Rose, 1924) and Hollywood films (for example, His People, 1925; The Jazz Singer, 1927; and film versions of Abie’s Irish Rose in 1928 and 1946). But intermarriage in U.S. society was rare until the 1960s, when an assimilation-fueled spike (from around five percent to over thirty percent in 1970) was reflected in the short-lived and controversial Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–1973), in which New York Jewish Bernie Steinberg (the non-Jewish David Birney) weds Irish Catholic Bridget Fitzgerald (Meredith Baxter). Jewish women gained a measure of revenge through Rhoda’s marriage to non-Jew Joe Girard (played by the Jewish David Groh), which met with considerably less controversy over the intermarriage issue, partly assuaged by the tradition of matrilineal descent in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism and the statistically noted greater likelihood that children of a Jewish mother will be raised Jewish.

Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, over forty episodic shows with explicitly Jewish protagonists were produced, compared to ten or so in the previous forty years. In this period, the shiks-appeal pattern resumed with a vengeance. Such shows include thirtysomething (1987–1991), Chicken Soup (1989), Anything but Love (1989–1992), Seinfeld (1989-1998, which even titled an episode “Shiks-Appeal”), Northern Exposure (1990–1995), Mad About You (1992–1999), Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The O.C. (2003 –2007). Curb Your Enthusiasm’s resorting to a shiksa-based intermarriage was particularly striking given that the series was grounded in creator/star Larry David’s real life and that during its first few years Larry was actually married to Jewish producer/activist Lauri David.

A few major and minor reversals of the shiksa complex occurred during this period as well. Among the major were The Nanny’s series-capping marriage between titular nanny Fran Fine and non-Jewish boss Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaunessy), Dharma and Greg’s series-grounding union between ditzy, half-Jewish (on her father’s side) Dharma and white-bread Greg (Thomas Gibson), and Rude Awakening’s long-term affair between recovering drug addict Billie Frank and African American journalist Marcus (Mario Van Peebles). Of a more peripheral nature were Frasier Crane’s (Kelsey Grammer) wife Lilith Stern (Bebe Neuwirth) in Cheers; and the romance between Melissa Steadman (Melanie Mayron) and Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton) in thirtysomething. Significantly, however, all the Jewish women-based interfaith relationships except those in The Nanny, Dharma and Greg, and Rude Awakening end in separation or divorce, as had Rhoda’s to Joe Girard after one ratings-dipping season. Or they are dealt with posthumously, as in Everwood (2002–2006), given the accidental death, in the pilot episode, of the Jewish wife of non-Jewish Dr. Andrew Brown (Treat Williams), who goes on to raise their Jewish-identifying children, Ephram and Delia (Gregory Smith and Vivien Cadrone).

Aside from providing a ready subject for domestic conflict (as Larry David cited as justification for his “fake” TV intermarriage), television intermarriages sometimes constituted an autobiographical exercise. Jewish male predominance behind the scenes clearly played a role in the gender imbalance of interfaith romance on screen, as did many of these showrunners’, directors’, and writers’ indulgence in the practice. Moreover, dramas of marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew also became emblematic of intermarriage (religious, ethnic, class, regional, etc.) in general. Indeed, by using the family unit as a symbolic setting in which to investigate Jewish integration into American culture, such shows served as case studies of the overall challenge of cultural integration.

The intermarriage scenario writ large also reflected a concern by the networks (and showrunners) that an entirely Jewish family would be of limited interest to an American mass audience. After the original The Goldbergs and Rhoda, no other all-Jewish family identified as such would appear at the center of a prime-time series until the Silvers of Brooklyn Bridge, and even this exception was qualified by the show’s nostalgic, 1950s-period setting. Arrested Development, which appeared on the counter-programming Fox network in the early 2000s (later revived on Netflix), ended the Jewish family hiatus and broke the warm, cuddly mold. Indeed, the hyper-dysfunctional Bluth family, along with the nebbishy obnoxious Larry David and his agent’s loud-mouthed wife Susie Greene (Susie Essman) on Curb Your Enthusiasm, though no doubt viewed as “bad for the Jews” by many coreligionists, also indicated that Jews felt confident enough in American society to portray themselves in a decidedly unfavorable light.

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