Star Trek boldly built the most Jewish and diverse ship in space

Then you had the Chief Engineer, Montgomery Scott, played by James Doohan, who although Canadian put his back into a Scottish accent, because everyone knows the best engineers are Scots; Doohan, incidentally, had half of one of his fingers blown off during D-Day but he managed to hide this injury for the cameras.

And there was Uhura, the calm and competent communications officer; and the first thing you’d have noticed about her was that she was black. Unless the first thing you noticed about her was that she was a woman. Now, in 1966, the idea of having a woman on the bridge of a ship of the line (and the hierarchy and grammar of the show was very naval) was mind-blowing enough; having her as a Person of Colour even more so. The show’s founder, Gene Rodenberry, who knew exactly what he was doing, made sure that her seat on the bridge was directly behind, and in line with, the Captain’s; and the reason Rodenberry placed her there was because he wanted to make sure that when the show was syndicated in the South, network executives wouldn’t have been able to crop her out. And believe me, they would have if they could have.

But as for the two main characters … here is where this publication pricks up its ears. They are the Enterprise’s captain, James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner) and his second-in-command, Science officer Spock (no first name given; it’s apparently unpronounceable by humans; played by Leonard Nimoy). Now Kirk looks and acts like an all-American hero, gung-ho, legendarily randy, and as cunning as Odysseus. Spock, though, is an alien from the planet Vulcan: emotionless, a walking computer and brainier than one, supremely rational but with pointy ears. It’s on the relationship between Kirk and Spock that the show pivots. (There’s also a loveable but mildly racist doctor but I don’t have the space, so to speak.)

Now the thing is that the actors playing Kirk and Spock were, and in Shatner’s case still is, Jewish. This is, I think, significant. On the famously inclusive Enterprise there are no explicitly Jewish characters: except that its two stars were. Nemoy, though, managed to sneak a bit of synagogue choreography onto the bridge of the Enterprise. His Vulcan salute, he later revealed, was borrowed from the priestly blessing of the Kohanim. Judaism thus reached the final frontier.

At the time, the Jew in American popular culture was a kind of nebbish: the neurotic Woody Allen type, the kind of person who couldn’t read on public transport because it made him feel queasy.

But here were very different Jewish archetypes: the dedicated scholar (who actually, in several episodes, could be relied upon to lose his marbles, because that was more fun for storytelling purposes); and the epitome of derring-do, the man who would get stuck into the action whatever the personal risk, and while at it get the woman, and win the day.

So, before the series leaves Netflix on January 8, take some time out to visit, or revisit, this most excellent of programmes, and find, if you can, an Enterprise-shaped menorah.