https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/164916/
As you might imagine, the desk at The Los Angeles Times Magazine didn't have to ask twice if I was interested in a short tour of duty aboard the new ship of the line. And to start things rolling, I was provided an audience with the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry or, as he presented himself while seated in a wheelchair in the expansive office of his palatial Bel-Air home, Gene.
I decided to conclude our wide-ranging interview with an issue that had intrigued me since I began covering Jewish and Israeli affairs. I suggested that there seemed to be something almost uniquely Jewish about the flavor of the Star Trek universe. Roddenberry perked up. “How so?”
“Consider,” I said, drawing upon long practiced Vulcan equanimity. “Earth has chosen a Federation as its greatest organizing entity. The Federation believes in outreach and mutual acceptance and respect as organizing principles. The peripatetic protagonists are tasked with the ongoing mission of wandering the galaxy. The second banana, hired because his unconventional Jewish face suggested alien qualities, used rabbinic gestures to convey salutations, and parsed the wild and wooly universe with the logic-bound aplomb of a Talmudic scholar.”
I left unsaid that performers Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Walter Koenig, as well as producers Robert Justman, Herb Solow and Fred Freiberger and too many writers to name were all fellow tribesmen. Roddenberry, I concluded, must have been a philo-Semite of the first order to surround himself with so many Red Sea pedestrians.
The congenial Roddenberry concluded what I later realized was a slow burn. “You Jews,” he snarled, “have a lamentable habit of identifying those characteristics in a society that you deem positive and then taking credit for inventing them”
