Leonard Nimoy, best known for his role as Spock on “Star Trek,” turned the split-finger kohanic blessing into a pop-cult gesture. Born in Boston’s West End neighborhood in 1931 to Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents from Ukraine, he rediscovered his Jewish roots later in life.
Nimoy died Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. The cause was end-stage chronic pulmonary disease, the New York Times reported. He was 83.
After teaching method acting in his own studio and making several minor film and television appearances in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nimoy was cast as Spock, a pragmatic alien with trademark pointed ears, in 1965. “Star Trek” became a cult classic show in the 1970s and eventually spawned five subsequent TV series and 12 films.
Nimoy played Spock for over four decades and sustained a successful Broadway theater career. His other notable acting roles include Paris in the spy series “Mission Impossible” and the psychiatrist David Kibner in a 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” He also directed two of the “Star Trek” films and the 1987 comedy “Three Men and a Baby.”
Nimoy displayed his ambivalence about being closely identified with the Spock role through the titles of his two autobiographies, “I Am Not Spock” (1975) and “I Am Spock” (1995).
In 1991, he produced and starred in “Never Forget,” a TV movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sues a group of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, and four years later he hosted an NPR series in which Jewish celebrities read aloud Jewish short stories. In 2002, he published “Shekhina,” a book of photographs of semi-nude Jewish women, which angered Orthodox leaders. And in 2009, he narrated a documentary about the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Nimoy was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role as Golda Meir’s husband in “A Woman Called Golda” in 1982. — jta
Excerpt from a 1991 JTA interview with Leonard Nimoy, by Tom Tugend
Leonard Nimoy had a difficult childhood growing up in a middle-class section of Boston. Both his parents had arrived separately in the United States from the small Ukrainian town of Zaslav in the early 1920s. In Boston, father Max became a partner in a barbershop.
The Nimoy household kept kosher and was flexibly Orthodox. Nimoy’s studious older brother, Melvin, was clearly the parents’ favorite. When Nimoy gave the first inkling of his future calling by starring in a children’s play at 8, the father declared sternly that he hadn’t come all the way from Russia to America to see a son waste his life as an actor.
The family pecking order powerfully influenced Nimoy’s career.
“Family life made me a supporting player to my brother and later, as an actor, I continued to be most comfortable in that role,” he says. “I did not aspire to be the leading man but sought out the role of the outsider, the alien, who would be a secondary character.”
The sense of alienation was reinforced by growing up in a predominantly Italian Catholic neighborhood.
“Being Jewish, I always sensed some element of difference, a separation,” Nimoy recalls.
His early psychological bent became irreversible — as did his decision to become an actor — when as a 17-year-old he landed his first real stage role as the teenage son, Ralphie, in Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing.” The play dramatized the struggles of a Jewish family, the Bergers, in the depth of the 1930s Depression.
“That was an amazing event,” Nimoy says. “That characters could talk about Jewish concerns on an American stage made me feel validated as a person and as a Jew. Berger in the play was my mother, desperately trying to control her family life to make it manageable. And my role as a young man, surrounded by a hostile and repressive environment, so touched a responsive chord that I decided to make a career of acting.”
As a struggling young actor in the early 1950s, Nimoy, inspired by the rebirth of the Jewish state and childhood memories of Zionist rallies in Boston Garden, considered making aliyah to join Habimah, Israel’s national theater.
Upon cooler reflection on the huge language barrier he would face, Nimoy dropped the idea and instead headed west to Hollywood, where he enrolled in acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse. As one of the few youthful Yiddish speakers in town, he picked up a few dollars in minor roles whenever a Yiddish theater troupe came to town.
“I was in a play with the great Maurice Schwartz, the most famous Yiddish actor of his time, and hoping to gain some credibility in the eyes of my parents, I asked him to write a letter to them saying that I was doing all right. And he did so,” Nimoy says.
One thing Nimoy appreciated about Hollywood was the pervasive Jewish influence in the film industry, which dampened any blatant expressions of anti-Semitism.
“At least I didn’t have to hear such terms as ‘dirty kike’ as l did in Boston,” he says.
The watershed event in Nimoy’s life came in 1965 when he was cast as Spock in what would become the enormously successful “Star Trek” television series and subsequent motion pictures. Nimoy, as the rational, pointy-eared Spock, quickly became a pop hero.
Has the “Star Trek” phenomenon been a curse or a blessing?
“Both,” Nimoy says jocularly before quickly changing his tone and adding, “I shouldn’t be facetious about this.” Spock’s fame “has given me an entree and influence, the chance to translate my abilities into other kinds of work, to play in the theater because they know that I can sell tickets.”