Star Trek: The Next Generation
Reporting at the launch of a new cast and production era.
Dossier 04 · Film, television & Jewish culture
My Starry Trek
Star Trek reporting, interviews & essays, 1987–2015.
A connected body of reporting on authorship and succession: the creator, producers, writers and actors who made Trek larger than any one of them. The Jewish pieces return to the same reporting through cultural inheritance and personal memory.
The prologue · 1987
The centerpiece · 1991
Trekking to the Top
The panoramic feature: a fictional future, a workplace and a business.
The 1991 succession · Four close-ups
The covers illustrate the subjects of the pieces. Cover dates and article dates are shown separately.
Gene Roddenberry, Philosopher, Junior Grade
The creator on philosophy, control and the people who would carry Trek forward.
Harve Bennett: Movie Paradise Lost
The producer’s view of sustaining the film series.
Star Trek VI: The Last Hurrah?
The original cast at a moment of transition.
Nicholas Meyer: Franchise Mr. Fix-It
The writer-director as an irreverent renovator.
The reporting continues
STAR TREK
An additional contemporary item, preserved under its archive title.
Tracking Trek
A profile of Mark A. Altman. The archive also preserves a CFQ reprint; this is one article.
The Jewish Trek
My Son the Klingon
Where No Anti-Semite Has Gone Before?
Der Yiddisher Vulcan
My Jewish Trek
The concluding retrospective: fandom, reporting, Roddenberry, Nimoy and Jewish identity.
The body of work in tandem
Authorship & inheritance
Roddenberry supplies an originating philosophy; Bennett and the studio make it sustainable; Meyer renovates it; actors, writers, journalists and fans dispute its meaning. The franchise develops through several custodians, not a single author.
Myth & machinery
The Enterprise is both a utopian vessel and a Paramount set. Roddenberry is both the creator and an aging producer; Meyer is both myth-maker and hired fixer. The reporting crosses between imagined ideals and the practical labor of making television and film.
Succession, Jewish identity & memory
The 1991 pieces record a transition while its outcome was still uncertain. The Jewish inquiry emerges from that same reporting, becomes explicit in The Jerusalem Report, and reaches its retrospective synthesis in My Jewish Trek. By 2015, the Montreal fan, the Hollywood reporter and the Jewish-affairs journalist have entered the same frame.