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64 Friday, July 6, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
From
Molly Goldberg
to 'Face
The Nation'
The little-known National
Jewish Archives of Broad-
casting is spending a great deal
of money to preserve TV
programs of a Jewish nature.
BY PAULA SPAN
Special to The Jewish News
.
In the archive's collection are
segments from TV's "Molly
Goldberg," starring Gertrude
Berg, and at right, Edward R.
Murrow's 1956 "See It Now"
interview with David
Ben-Gurion, among many other
memorable television shows. At
right, Fay Schreibman, director
of the archive, screens a
videotape from the files.
ownstairs at the Jewish
Museum in New York City,
the galleries, halls and
elevators overflow with visitors
who've come to see "The Precious Le-
gacy" exhibit of Czechoslovakian
Jewish artifacts that curators re-
scued when the culture that produced
them vanished into the Holocaust.
(That exhibit is coming to the Detroit
Institute of Arts next spring.)
Upstairs, way upstairs, in
cramped temporary quarters on the
sixth floor, the three staffers who
currently comprise the National
Jewish Archive of Broadcasting see
themselves as undertaking a similar
mission. Hundreds of episodes of "Et-
ernal Light" instead of illuminated
manuscripts. News footage from Is-
rael instead of porcelain seder plates.
Manishewitz wine commercials in-
stead of embroidered Torah curtains.
But the same intent.
- That, at least, is the argument
director Fay Schreibman has honed
for use when skeptics ask why she
wants to preserve videotape of Molly
Picon singing or Sandy Koufax pitch-
ing, whether the Charles H. Revson
Foundation hadn't anything more
momentous to do with the half a mil-
lion dollars with which it launched
the archive three years ago.
After all, the public
— only be-
.
ginning to learn of the archive's
existence since its opening in March
— isn't clamoring to see Molly
Free-lance writer Paula Span
contributes to many national magazines
and newspapers.
Goldberg yoo-hooing out her window
or Eleanor Roosevelt discussing Suez
in a 1956 "Face the Nation." And re-
searchers, one of the constituencies
the archive intends to service, aren't
flocking in yet either: they've grown
accustomed to writing dissertations
on the subject of film (and its cultural
implications) but not yet on televi-
sion (with its non-intellectual conno-
tations). "There's not a crying aca-
demic need for this sort of study,"
Schreibman acknowledges. "It's too
new. So we're stimulating it."
Meanwhile, Schreibman and a
platoon of interns are stashing film
and videotape in climate-controlled
storage, developing a microcumputer
catalogue, searching network files.
The archive is taking an exceed-
ingly broad view of what belongs in
its collection: essentially, anything
broadcast for Jews (like the Sunday
morning religious programs, years of
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them), by Jews (like the works of
Norman Lear and Paddy Chayefsky),
or about Jews, doing anything, any-
where in the world. "Sixty Minutes"
visits a Jewish wedding in Romania.
"Nightline" interviews refuseniks in
Russia. A Nazi officer encounters a
ghost at Dachau in a 1961 episode of
"The Twilight Zone." Rossi and Ani-
mal cover a Nazi and JDL confronta-
tion in a 1982 "Lou Grant." And
Adolf Eichmann sitting impassive
behind his eyeglasses and head-
phones through 178 videotaped
hours of his Jerusalem trial — the
archive's most-used item. "And we
haven't even touched radio,"
Schreibman points out.
Like Everest, the stuff is simply
there — but may not be for long. "In
the old days, -most things were
junked. Videotapes were erased.
There's a great deal missing,"
Schreibman laments. "We • have to,
start collecting things now. Other-
wise, when everyone decides we need
these materials, it will be too late."
And why do we need them? They
have some educational value, of
course. The museum's education de-
partment works with children
who've never seen Golda Meir or
Moshe Dayan except in books: the
archive makes history more real.
More sbOhisticated analysts ' can"
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r.Tralznitly-vrairr
trace, through 35 years of programm-
ing and commercials, the rise and
subsidence of the brotherhood theme,
American Jewry's increasing preoc-
cupation with Israel, the
reemergence of pride in ethnicity,
and other trends that will lend them-
selves nicely to articles in sociology
journals.
. But . Schreibman, who had di-
rected a tel6vision news study center
at George WashiUgton University
before coming here, also likes to place
the new archive squarely within the
tradition of the Jew as witness. "Jews
have always been keepers of history,
more than any other people perhaps.
And this is the logical extension. The ',--
i
record of the 20th Century is the I
moving image."
Amassing these hundreds of
reels has consumed most of the arc-
hive's first three years. A "Philco
Playhouse" play about a Passover in
the Old West, presumed lost, has ap-
parently turned up in an actress'
closet. But human eyes may never
again encounter 'The Billy Rose
Playbill" of the 1950s. John Cameron
Swayze's "Camel News Caravan," a
newsreel which covered the begin-
ning of Israel statehood, 'is proving
equally difficult to track down. But
an archive intern (a rabbinieal stu-
dent from Rhode Island) read
through years of fles at CBS and fi-
nally unearthed the Jewish episode
of "Gunsmoke," a find which may not
rank with Masada in archeological
annuals but has its own interest.
Negotiating with the networks,
who were willing to contribute mate-
rial but required indemnity before
turning over copyrighted broldcasts,
inspired "new heights of creative
legalese." The start-up grant is end-
ing and the applications are flowing, I
the funding hustle familiar to non- ',
profit organizations. Renovations for' ,_
new, though still small, offices on the; •';
museum's third floor are underway. 1 d
With All tliis activity, the arc-, . 1
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.