Norman Lear Made America Confront Antisemitism and Racism

For much of the 1970s and 1980s, America was defined by Jewish-American director and producer Norman Lear and the groundbreaking television shows he created.

At Lear’s peak popularity, each week 120 million people would watch the TV sitcoms he created, a majority of all American adults. Hit shows such as All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Mary Hartman, Maude, One Day at a Time, and Sanford and Son reflected a changing America, grappling with weighty issues that audiences weren’t used to seeing on TV.

Before Lear started creating television programs, the “biggest problems on shows was the pot roast is ruined and the boss is coming for dinner” he told the Chicago magazine JUF News in 2015. “These shows sent the message that there are no race problems in America, there is no antisemitism, there is no bad economy, and there are no health problems.”

Norman Lear with the cast from All in the Family

American viewers were used to watching a sanitized version of life in movies and television. In show after show, Lear changed that, pushing the limits of what was acceptable to show on television, and creating flawed characters whose problems and foibles transfixed a generation of viewers. His medium was comedy, and the laughs Lear elicited helped audiences process the often difficult themes he explored.

Lear’s show All in the Family, which debuted in 1971, featured a bigoted main character, Archie Bunker, who reacts to the rapid social changes that were then rocking the United States. “When I thought about what made Archie a bigot, it was that he was afraid of life, afraid of tomorrow, afraid of what’s new,” Lear explained in his 2021 book All in the Family: The Show That Changed Television. “He was comfortable with what existed. And Black people moving next door - that was too new for him. He couldn’t deal with progress and change.”

Lear was determined to probe this social moment, holding a mirror up for American viewers who were processing changing mores too.

All in the Family featured Black and Jewish characters, a rarity for television at the time. It also didn’t shy away from exploring racism and antisemitism. In the 1973 episode, Archie is Branded, for instance, Archie and his family are shocked to see that someone painted a large swastika on their front door. Archie is convinced it’s local kids causing trouble - until he finds out that the swastika was meant for a Jewish activist who lived nearby.

In the episode Archie in the Hospital, Archie is hospitalized for back pain. Unable to get out of bed, he strikes up a warm friendship with a patient on the other side of a partition in the room - only to be shocked and horrified later on when he comes face to face with his new friend and finds he’s Black.

One of the most famous All in the Family episodes featured Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990), the famed Black Jewish singer. Playing himself, Sammy Davis Jr. leaves his briefcase in the back of Archie Bunker’s cab, phones the cab company when he realizes his mistake, and the next morning turns up at the Bunker’s house to retrieve his bag. Archie is impressed by the famous singer, but still can’t quiet his racism and antisemitism. “I know you had no choice about bein’ colored,” he asks his Davis Jr., “but what made you turn Jew?”

It’s a shockingly racist line that caught audiences off guard - and also articulated the deeply held prejudices of its time.

Lear’s hit sitcom The Jeffersons started as a spin-off of All in the Family when the Bunkers’ Black neighbors, the Jeffersons, prosper financially and move away to a better neighborhood. It was a groundbreaking plot line at a time: Black characters were rarely depicted on television - and certainly not as wealthy, successful businesspeople.

Music executive Russell Simmons once told Norman Lear that the first time he ever saw a Black man writing a check was on The Jeffersons, when the character George Jefferson, played by Sherman Hemsley, engaged in this otherwise prosaic act and showed Simmons that it was possible for Black men to be successful and financially stable - and to be seen that way by others.

Lear’s Jewish Identity

Lear credited his Jewish identity with making him sensitive to the plight of outsiders, whether Jewish or Black.

He had a difficult childhood. Lear grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in a poor Jewish immigrant family. His mother was from Ukraine and his father’s family had moved to the US from Russia. When Lear was nine years old, his father went to jail for three years for selling fake bonds to a Boston brokerage house. Lear’s mother and sister lived together, while Lear was sent to live with his bubbe and zayde (grandmother and grandfather) in New Haven. It was the only time in his life that Lear enjoyed the weekly holiday of Shabbat. “I sat on Friday evenings,” with his grandparents, he later recalled, playing card games and enjoying the peace and quiet and each other’s company.

Around the time his father went to prison, Lear realized that his presence as a Jew in America wasn’t always welcome. The nine year old Lear made a homemade radio for himself - and promptly heard Father Charles Coughlin, a wildly popular and extremely antisemitic radio personality in the 1920s and 1930s. “That kid poking around on his crystal set, spooked by a Jew hater, still lives in me,” Lear wrote in his 2014 memoir, Even This I Get to Experience.

Lear’s feelings of being a despised minority never entirely left him, no matter how successful he became. “I could be, and often was, at the center of things and still feel like an outsider.” It was this sensitivity to the constant slights that minorities felt in the United States that made him feel a kinship with Black Americans too. “I don’t know at what point it was,” Lear recalled, “that I realized what these Black kids - there weren’t that many in those schools I went to - had it far worse than I because I was Jewish. So I was empathetic at an early age.”

Married three times, he is survived by his six children. Lear worked tirelessly for progressive causes, and remained active and working in film and television until the very end of his life. In a CNN interview two years ago, at the age of 99, Lear shared his secret to feeling energetic and vital at that advanced age: lox and bagels, lots of laughter, and the love of his family.

Most of all, he felt a burning need to keep on creating and contributing to the world. “I like getting up in the morning with something on my mind, something I can work on…to some conclusion.”