Live long and prosper: The Jewish boys who imagined a better galaxy

Walter Koenig’s death is a reminder that Chekov, Kirk and Spock were all sons of Jewish immigrants, and that Spock’s famous salute is a priestly blessing

Walter Koenig died on Sunday at his home in North Hollywood. He was 90. To most of the world he will always be Ensign Pavel Chekov, the young Russian navigator with the mop-top haircut and an accent he said he borrowed from his own father.

I grew up with that bridge crew. What I did not know until this week was that Chekov was one of ours. Koenig was born in Chicago in 1936 to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Somewhere on the road to America, the family name Königsberg became Koenig.

So I went looking, and the picture widened. William Shatner, Captain Kirk, grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in Montreal. All four of his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine and Lithuania. That one I really should have known. Growing up, my best friend was Tamara, Shatner’s second cousin. Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock, was raised in an Orthodox family in Boston and spoke Yiddish as a boy. He and Shatner were born four days apart in March 1931. When Nimoy told his parents he was leaving for Hollywood to act, his grandfather suggested he take up the accordion instead.

Nimoy left the clearest mark. In 1967 the show sent Spock home to Vulcan for the first time, and Nimoy wanted his people to have a greeting of their own. He reached back to a childhood morning in an Orthodox synagogue in Boston. During the priestly blessing, when the congregation is meant to look away, he peeked. He saw the kohanim raise their hands with the fingers parted to form the Hebrew letter shin. He gave that gesture to Spock.

Sixty years on, people flash it at each other at conventions, on birthday cards and in emoji. Nimoy loved the joke at the heart of it. “People don’t realize they’re blessing each other with this!” he said.

Star Trek was a hopeful show made in a frightened decade. It put a Russian on the bridge at the height of the Cold War, at a time when Soviet Jews were barred from leaving the country Chekov was so proud of. Its helmsman was played by George Takei, who had spent part of his childhood in an American internment camp. Its communications officer was a Black woman. The Federation imagined a future in which where you came from no longer decided where you could go.

It makes sense to me that the grandchildren of people who fled pogroms would pour themselves into that idea. Shatner has spoken about getting into fights at school in Montreal because he was Jewish, and about university places for Jewish students being capped no matter how well they did. Nimoy grew up an outsider in a very Catholic Boston and said that was exactly why he understood Spock, the half-human who never quite belonged on either world.

I started my career as a war correspondent and have spent a good part of it since October 7 alongside families waiting for news of the people they love. I know how easy it is to stop believing in the future. Jewish history gives us every reason to be wary. It has also, again and again, produced people who insist on imagining something better and then go and build it. Three of them were standing on the bridge of the Enterprise.

In 2021, at the age of 90, Shatner flew to the edge of space on a Blue Origin rocket. Captain Kirk finally got there. Koenig’s death leaves him and Takei as the last of the original main cast.

The next time you see someone raise that split-fingered hand, it is worth remembering the words that go with it in shul. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine upon you. May the Lord lift up His face to you and give you peace.

Walter Koenig, may his memory be a blessing.