The Goldbergs, Puzzle Advertisement
Year: 1932
Creator: Pepsodent Co.
Type: Color Lithograph

The Goldbergs, one of the first successful television sitcoms, spawned from a popular radio program and ran from 1949 to 1956. The show centered around a family of Eastern European Jews living in the Bronx, and often explored themes of ethnicity, financial struggles, and family.

The undeniable star of the show was matriarch Mollie Goldberg, played by series writer and creator Gertrude Berg. A “bighearted, lovingly meddlesome, and somewhat stereotypical” mother with a Yiddish accent, Mrs.Goldberg in each episode, would address the audience from the apartment window, as depicted in the puzzle above. The Goldbergs was part of a roster of shows on early ‘50s television dealing with lower-class immigrant families and their problems; however, as mainstream Americans found prosperity in postwar America and moved to the suburbs, so did the Goldbergs, and the show quickly lost its working-class Jewish roots as television studios moved to portray a more affluent, patriarch-centered, white American lifestyle, exemplified in shows such as Leave It to Beaver. Source