That One Judaism Post

I should preface this by saying that I am not Jewish, I have no connection(s) to Judaism other than a few good friends who've shared bits of their history/culture/traditions with me over the years, I'm merely an ambiguously brown Middle Eastern individual as far as claims to ethnic representation go.

However: it never fails to be so amazing to me that Leonard Nimoy and Henry Winkler have such similar and heartwarming stories regarding the popularity arcs of their cult favorite characters, Spock (full name generally deemed unpronounceable and certainly not iconic in its own right) and Fonzie (Arthur Fonzarelli, in more formal terms). I'm not even going to try to explain them further. If you don't know who and/or what I'm talking about, this post is already not for you - and I mean that with all affection.

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Nimoy was born in 1931 in Boston, Massachusetts, to immigrants from the Soviet Union in Ukraine, and Winkler was born in 1945 in New York, New York, to immigrants from the Nazi regime in Berlin. The former attended Boston College but eventually entered the U.S. Army before completing a degree, while the latter attended Emerson College (in Boston) before finishing a MFA at Yale School of Drama. I'm not here to write biographies about Jewish icons from New England, because I already did my stint with Leonard Bernstein for his 100th anniversary back in 2018, but there's just something so...so about it.

Both were unbilled on Star Trek and Happy Days to begin with and were initially further hushed by the networks, CBS and NBC, for being presented in a way that wasn't definitively audience- and ratings-friendly across the board. Spock had pointed ears, iconographic of a "devil" character, and Fonzie rode a motorcycle, iconographic of a "hood" character. (In fact, showrunner Garry Marshall had the clever idea to use the motorcycle to make a leather jacket, rather than a puce windbreaker, essential - for safety, for safety!)

After the first few episodes, feedback for these two was unexpectedly all adoration, and both Nimoy and Winkler expressed that their next worry was how the actual top-billed stars, William Shatner and Ron Howard, would react to the necessitated shift in spotlight. I have interview links here and here (having a little trouble finding the corresponding one from Henry's perspective, if it does/did in fact exist).

Ron Howard and Henry Winkler are of course great friends to this day, best men and godfathers to each other's children and all that (this one encapsulates it), and from what I've read/watched William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were not close friends until closer to the filming of the TOS movies and drifted apart before Nimoy's passing in 2015, never to make up, so those don't track exactly the same, but at the beginning, it was all there.

Happy Days went on to run for 11 seasons, with Fonzie appearing in all 255 episodes and Richie dipping out after the seventh season, while Star Trek only ran for 3 seasons and 80 episodes, but who was in the pilot when James Tiberius Kirk was not? That's right. Now, they're still making Star Trek TV series and movies to this day, while Happy Days (ugh, yes, this) spawned the "jump the shark" catchphrase to describe a media franchise run and beat past its prime at the beginning of its fifth season, but I don't think anyone remembers the bronze statue of Fonzie in Milwaukee any less fondly for it. (The spinoffs Joanie Loves Chachi, Laverne & Shirley, and Mork & Mindy all remained largely self-contained, too.)

Now, in comparison to Star Trek fandom, Happy Days fandom is virtually nonexistent (I might flatter myself to be among the core group of about a dozen or so online, tops), but both Spock and Fonzie sit opposite a main character without whom they could not truly exist not necessarily just because the (obvious) pairing is all that drives the canon but because the call and response is there, and moreover both of them (at least to me!) represent trans, gay/bi, and general queer characterization that mean so much to me, even though if my nonbinaryness ever leans it's not usually in the masc direction.

Fonzie has an episode where he's baptized in the fourth season of Happy Days, but everyone I know unequivocally clings to him being Jewish through and through anyway. The ta'al, otherwise known as the "Live Long and Prosper" salute, originated from a Jewish ceremony Nimoy witnessed when he was very young - this interview is fascinating, and he's a brilliant storyteller.

This isn't the best essay, and it's really more of a loose collection of neat discoveries I've made, so the fact that Nimoy voiced Xehanort in Kingdom Hearts and Winkler voiced Sharkface in Spongebob (I could have sworn it was one of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, but I'll gladly take Batman and Robin instead!) is just about all the depth I want to go into there. My final point, the thing that's funniest to me, is that these two menschs are so similar in what we might call myth, but in actuality the connections are:

- William Shatner (Captain Kirk and a co-star on Better Late Than Never, a reality show about...old [celebrity] men on international vacation, go figure)
- Bruno Mars (Nimoy starred in the alternate video for The Lazy Song and Winkler is semi-famously a fan of the singer [1] [2])

To my knowledge, they never worked together (I wanted to say "they have never" at first...rest in peace Mr. Nimoy), but in a strange way I think in spirit they did. My big Happy Days hyperfixation (memorizing the names of every episode in order, making GIFs with every bootleg screen capture conversion website method I could dredge up) was many years ago now, to the point where I was young enough to waffle and whiff on the chance to meet Henry Winkler on a book tour hitting my local bookstore, and the constancy of Star Trek and Star Wars both throughout my youth is only just now ripping back through my consciousness and giving me something so potent to fixate on, well after Spock Prime's marvelous reappearance, so even just putting this little post together is very special for me. Thank you!

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AND HOW COULD I FORGET Mork's "nanu nanu" handshake? Debatably I should/could have chosen a picture of Fonzie doing a thumbs up to match Spock, but I ultimately decided against it. Amazing...

(Entirely unsure how I ended up with the idea that it was CBS that originally produced TOS and not NBC, the same as Happy Days... The contrast certainly was appealing, but not so much as to merit misinformation!)