Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Estelle Getty

Estelle Getty passed away yesterday. (Baruch dayan ha'emet and Ji Jang Bosal*.) I found the news at both Racialicious and Deadspin.
At Racialicious, Latoya Peterson writes:
Nooooooooooo!
At Deadspin, DAULERIO writes (in bold):
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
To the best of my knowledge, neither writer had any idea that Getty's passing is directly relevant to their website's general content.

Getty came out of New York Yiddish theater and Borscht Belt comedy. Makes sense, yeah? The downright mean, but totally endearing one-liners that made her character on The Golden Girls so popular. Absolutely from the same place as Joan Rivers and Don Rickles. But her character was named Sophia Petrillo. Italian Catholic. And Sophia's daughter, Dorothy Zbornak was by extension also Italian; though Dorothy was played by the also Jewish Bea Arthur.

The show ran from 1985 to 1992. And we're still having trouble portraying Jews on TV.

1 comment:

Matt said...

*I looked up on Google what Jews say when someone dies. It's apparently, "Baruch dayan ha'emet," and I hope that's right. Ji Jang Bosal is the Korean name for the Buddhist Bodhisattva, also known as Jizu (Jp.) and Ksitigarbha (Sk.) associated with death.