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Old August 2nd, 2017 #24
steven clark
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 2,277
Default Is Star Trek anti-semitic?

Anything but. It has a one world view and a semi-imperialist strain where Jews do very well. And above posts have mentioned all the race mixing. I watched the series back in the sixties, and have never seen the other versions. It was a lot of fun, and yes, when you compare it to Lost in Space…God, what a piece of tripe that was.
I remember Mark Goddard, one of the actors in LIS, recalled how he couldn't stop laughing because an episode he was so stupid he couldn't keep a straight face…even the final cut has him smiling.
It quickly became the Dr. Smith and Will Robinson show.

But Star trek also had some, shall we say, right wing moments. Kirk is on a planet where he provides arms (albeit muskets) to a proxy war…shades of Vietnam. Also, one episode has him with a group of whites under constant attack by the 'Chinks', and it turns out it is some kind of alternate universe where the Chinese overran the whites, and the whites are fighting back. Kirk even recovers the white's sacred stars and stripes and quotes the Declaration of Independence or something. A lot of Metro Trekkies really hate that one.

I think, however, of other sci-fi series. There is Stargate SG-1 where Colonel O'Neill and Te'uk are teamed up like Huck Finn and Jim. Also, Farscape, where a lot of wacky looking aliens are at odds with the Peacekeepers, who are always white. One of the aliens has a child by a white Peacekeeper, and a theme of the show is how the son keeps trying to make himself white. Also interesting is that for all the time spent on aliens, the real heart of the series is the American astronaut and Aeron Sun, a white peacekeeper. Real humans always win out over aliens.
Although Aeron Sun is played by Karen Black, and she really looks Jewish (and a tad horsey).
A tenant of sci-fi is an anti-white and universalist world.
As for Kirk and Uhuru's kiss, Roddenberry admits he was very proud of that moment.

Roddenberry also was behind The Lieutenant, a series before Star Trek, about a Lieutenant in the Marines. One episode (with Dennis Hopper) dealt with a 'bigoted Marine' (that was what we said before 'racist' took over) and a…what else? noble black Marine, and how the problem is overcome.
The series only lasted one season, and NBC cut that episode because it was too controversial.