I posted this in USMF and figured I would pass it on here. I had no idea.
"Serling was one of many Jewish artists of the 1950s and early ’60s who used popular culture to transform America for the better. Like his colleagues Reginald Rose (“Twelve Angry Men”) and Paddy Chayevsky (“Marty”), Serling elevated popular culture while helping American youth contemplate the racism, isolation and tragedy that existed beneath the shiny surface of post-World War II American life. Through The Twilight Zone (which premiered fifty years ago and ran for five years, until 1964), he made dramatic statements against prejudice, militarism, greed, conformity, and xenophobia — statements that were discussed during classroom recesses and workplace coffeebreaks throughout the country.
He was an American-heartland writer from Binghamton, New York. As his biographer Gordon F. Sander makes clear (Rod Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man, 1994), Binghamton was not only Serling’s home for his first eighteen years, but also a place of lifelong inspiration for him. He loved his childhood there and experienced Binghamton as a place of family protection and small-town kindness. The city’s five thousand Jews were close-knit, with their own baseball team and community center and a great deal of community pride.
Although he grew up in an era when anti-Jewish feeling and the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise, Serling’s awareness of bigotry did not stop him from making friends with all kinds of people. He was popular in high school. He was short and light yet a fine athlete, as well as an excellent student-journalist and a natural performer. Still, in Binghamton, writes Sander, Jewish children had to “put up with a certain amount of harassment at school, like having to take examinations that were deliberately scheduled for the Jewish High Holy Days.” This was perceived by Serling’s father, Sam, as “annoying, perhaps even worrisome,” but “not enough to put off a doughty Jewish emigrant like Sam Serling . . .” The dual nature of the city’s reality would later become a major Twilight Zone theme, as Rod Serling’s teleplays repeatedly revealed the potential cruelty masked even by friendly faces.
In addition to his father’s influence, Serling was strongly affected by “Isidore Friedlander, the director of the Binghamton Jewish Community Center and teacher of its Sunday school, where Serling was enrolled from the age of 8 to 12.” Friedlander, who became the model for some of Serling’s Twilight Zone characters, was fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish and was “a poet, musician, translator and playwright,” according to Sander. It was “the kindly, philosophical Friedlander,” he continues, “who helped inculcate Serling with his fierce moralism even while the Serling family was in some ways straying from the actual Jewish faith . . .”
In the 1930s, the radio plays of his hero, Norman Corwin (born May 3rd, 1910 and still alive today), sensitized young Rod to the meaning of Nazism’s rise not only for the Jewish people but also for the whole world — and to the tricks of dramatic storytelling. Eventually, Serling would be among the first writers to introduce Holocaust-related themes to television. One Twilight Zone episode, “He’s Alive,” traces the career of a young American Nazi (played by Dennis Hopper), whose only adult friend is a gentle Jewish scholar. Hitler’s ghost is seen coaching the Hopper character and demanding the old Jewish man’s death. In another episode, “Deaths-Head Revisited,” a Nazi commandant returns to Dachau to relive his days of sadism. He is placed on trial by the ghosts of the Jewish people he has brutalized and murdered, and sentenced to a life of mental anguish and torture in which he feels, at every moment, the pain of his victims.
Serling, speaking to the audience off camera, concludes: “There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
His ongoing work for Playhouse 90 (a dramatic series of ninety-minute dramas that broadcast from 1956 to 1961) included an episode dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis were never treated comically by Serling as they would be in Hogan’s Heroes, a program he detested. In Serling’s hands, Nazis were portrayed not only as men driven by mean and petty passions, but as the real or potential murderers they were and are. During a period when George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party were being dismissed as inconsequential by much of the American media, Serling understood the American Nazis and hate groups as a threat.
During World War II, Serling had been a paratrooper and experienced fierce combat in the Pacific, where he lost many of his friends and all sense of war as a romantic adventure. He understood the absolute necessity of the war, but was haunted by his combat experience (for which he was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart) for the rest of his life. “By the time Japan finally sued for peace,” writes Sander, “. . . only 30 percent of the original members of the regiment from Camp Toccia were still alive . . . Then, on the same day, came the telegram informing Serling of the death of his father, of a heart attack, at the age of 55...”
"Serling was one of many Jewish artists of the 1950s and early ’60s who used popular culture to transform America for the better. Like his colleagues Reginald Rose (“Twelve Angry Men”) and Paddy Chayevsky (“Marty”), Serling elevated popular culture while helping American youth contemplate the racism, isolation and tragedy that existed beneath the shiny surface of post-World War II American life. Through The Twilight Zone (which premiered fifty years ago and ran for five years, until 1964), he made dramatic statements against prejudice, militarism, greed, conformity, and xenophobia — statements that were discussed during classroom recesses and workplace coffeebreaks throughout the country.
He was an American-heartland writer from Binghamton, New York. As his biographer Gordon F. Sander makes clear (Rod Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man, 1994), Binghamton was not only Serling’s home for his first eighteen years, but also a place of lifelong inspiration for him. He loved his childhood there and experienced Binghamton as a place of family protection and small-town kindness. The city’s five thousand Jews were close-knit, with their own baseball team and community center and a great deal of community pride.
Although he grew up in an era when anti-Jewish feeling and the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise, Serling’s awareness of bigotry did not stop him from making friends with all kinds of people. He was popular in high school. He was short and light yet a fine athlete, as well as an excellent student-journalist and a natural performer. Still, in Binghamton, writes Sander, Jewish children had to “put up with a certain amount of harassment at school, like having to take examinations that were deliberately scheduled for the Jewish High Holy Days.” This was perceived by Serling’s father, Sam, as “annoying, perhaps even worrisome,” but “not enough to put off a doughty Jewish emigrant like Sam Serling . . .” The dual nature of the city’s reality would later become a major Twilight Zone theme, as Rod Serling’s teleplays repeatedly revealed the potential cruelty masked even by friendly faces.
In addition to his father’s influence, Serling was strongly affected by “Isidore Friedlander, the director of the Binghamton Jewish Community Center and teacher of its Sunday school, where Serling was enrolled from the age of 8 to 12.” Friedlander, who became the model for some of Serling’s Twilight Zone characters, was fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish and was “a poet, musician, translator and playwright,” according to Sander. It was “the kindly, philosophical Friedlander,” he continues, “who helped inculcate Serling with his fierce moralism even while the Serling family was in some ways straying from the actual Jewish faith . . .”
In the 1930s, the radio plays of his hero, Norman Corwin (born May 3rd, 1910 and still alive today), sensitized young Rod to the meaning of Nazism’s rise not only for the Jewish people but also for the whole world — and to the tricks of dramatic storytelling. Eventually, Serling would be among the first writers to introduce Holocaust-related themes to television. One Twilight Zone episode, “He’s Alive,” traces the career of a young American Nazi (played by Dennis Hopper), whose only adult friend is a gentle Jewish scholar. Hitler’s ghost is seen coaching the Hopper character and demanding the old Jewish man’s death. In another episode, “Deaths-Head Revisited,” a Nazi commandant returns to Dachau to relive his days of sadism. He is placed on trial by the ghosts of the Jewish people he has brutalized and murdered, and sentenced to a life of mental anguish and torture in which he feels, at every moment, the pain of his victims.
Serling, speaking to the audience off camera, concludes: “There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
His ongoing work for Playhouse 90 (a dramatic series of ninety-minute dramas that broadcast from 1956 to 1961) included an episode dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis were never treated comically by Serling as they would be in Hogan’s Heroes, a program he detested. In Serling’s hands, Nazis were portrayed not only as men driven by mean and petty passions, but as the real or potential murderers they were and are. During a period when George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party were being dismissed as inconsequential by much of the American media, Serling understood the American Nazis and hate groups as a threat.
During World War II, Serling had been a paratrooper and experienced fierce combat in the Pacific, where he lost many of his friends and all sense of war as a romantic adventure. He understood the absolute necessity of the war, but was haunted by his combat experience (for which he was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart) for the rest of his life. “By the time Japan finally sued for peace,” writes Sander, “. . . only 30 percent of the original members of the regiment from Camp Toccia were still alive . . . Then, on the same day, came the telegram informing Serling of the death of his father, of a heart attack, at the age of 55...”
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