eternally - intermittent

It is from this slideshow and others that followed that we have gotten music fanvids and AMVs (Animated Music Videos) within modern fandom.

Kandy Fong's Fanlore article

Kandy Fong's AO3 profile

Oral interview with Kandy Fong and Marnie S. (2012)

Neil himself is long gone from this world, and yet every April 13th this group of internet strangers come together to celebrate him and his act of banging out the tunes. Like an entire holiday, all for this little guy

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” [David] Gerrold [a writer for TOS] said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”

To Boldly Explore the Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’

An exhibition at a Jewish cultural center has plenty of artifacts to delight Trekkies — but it also notes the Jewish origins of the Vulcan salute.

Jan. 4, 2022

Alex Welsh for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — Adam Nimoy gazed across a museum gallery filled with “Star Trek” stage sets, starship replicas, space aliens, fading costumes and props (think phaser, set to stun). The sounds of a beam-me-up transporter wafted across the room. Over his shoulder, a wall was filled with an enormous photograph of his father — Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on the show — dressed in his Starfleet uniform, his fingers splayed in the familiar Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.

But that gesture, Adam Nimoy noted as he led a visitor through this exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, was more than a symbol of the television series that defined his father’s long career playing the part-Vulcan, part-human Spock. It is derived from part of a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston as a boy and brought to the role.

The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.

But walking through the artifacts Adam Nimoy recalled how his father, the son of Ukrainian Jews who spoke no English when they arrived, had said he identified with Spock, pointing out that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise.”

The “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center includes a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode — and tribbles.

Jewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality, said David Gerrold, a writer whose credits include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” one of the most acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes, which introduces the crew to a cute, furry, rapidly reproducing alien life form.

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”

That connection was not explicit when the show first aired. And a stroll through the exhibition, which covers the original television show as well as some of the spinoffs and films that came to encompass the “Star Trek” industry, mainly turns up items that are of interest to “Star Trek” fans. There is a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode, a Klingon disrupter from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and a display of tribbles.

To some extent, the choice of this particular exhibition — “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” — to help usher the Skirball back into operation after a Covid shutdown reflects the imperatives museums everywhere are facing as they try to recover from a pandemic that has been so economically damaging. “These days — honestly, especially after the pandemic — museums are looking for ways to get people through the door,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the show for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Museums are struggling to find an audience and are looking for a pop culture hook.”

It seems to have worked. The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months here, a robust turnout given that the Skirball is limiting sales to 25 percent of capacity.

“This has been bringing in new people, no question,” said Sheri Bernstein, the museum director. “Attendance is important for the sake of relevance. It’s important for us to bring in a diverse array of people.”

Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

The intersections between the television series and Judaism begin with its two stars, Nimoy and William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk. “These are two iconic guys in outer space who are Jewish,” said Adam Nimoy. And it extends to the philosophy that infuses the show, created by Gene Roddenberry, who was raised a Southern Baptist but came to consider himself a humanist, according to his authorized biography.

Those underlying connections are unmistakable for people like Nimoy, 65, a television director who is both a devoted “Star Trek” fan and an observant Jew: He and his father often went to services in Los Angeles, and Friday night Sabbath dinners were a regular part of their family life.

Nimoy found no shortage of Jewish resonances and echoes in the exhibition, which opened in October and closes on Feb. 20. He stopped at a costume worn by a Gorn, a deadly reptilian extraterrestrial who was in a fight-to-the-death encounter with Kirk.

“When he gets the Gorn to the ground, he’s about to kill him,” Nimoy recounted. “The Gorn wants to kill Kirk. But something happens. Instead he shows mercy and restraint and refuses to kill the Gorn.”

“Very similar to the story of Joseph,” Nimoy said, referring to the way Joseph, in the biblical book of Genesis, declined to seek retribution against his brothers for selling him into slavery.

Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. Shatner, who is 90 and recently became the oldest person to go into space, declined to discuss the exhibition. “Unfortunately Mr. Shatner’s overcommitted production schedule precludes him from taking on any additional interviews,” said his assistant, Kathleen Hays.

The exhibition ran for about two years in Seattle after opening in 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek” TV show’s 1966 debut. (That version was on NBC for three seasons.) The exhibition had been intended to tour, but those plans were cut short when the pandemic began to close museums across the country.

The exhibition was assembled largely from the private collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and founder of the Museum of Pop Culture, who died in 2018.

Peck said he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the series with an exhibition that explored the outsize influence the television show had on American culture. “The answer that I am offering is that ‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents — the good character of many of its characters,” Peck said. “They are characters that people would like to emulate.”

“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek' fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”

Bernstein, the Skirball director, said the exhibition seemed a particularly good way to help bring the museum back to life.

“There was never a better time to present this show than now,” she said. “We very much liked the idea of reopening our full museum offerings with a show that was about inspiring hope. A show that promised enjoyment.”

By spring, ‘Star Trek’ will step aside for a less surprising offering, an exhibition about Jewish delis, but for now, the museum is filled both with devotees of Jewish culture, admiring a Torah case from China, and Trekkies, snapping pictures of the captain’s chair that Kirk sat in aboard the Enterprise.

and one may wonder if this person knows (given that "Zionism" is a movement which supported first the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland and now supports the continuation of a Jewish state in Israel and that the two-state solution means a Jewish state exists) that Leonard Nimoy said:

As painful as life is, a lot of the times... you're alive! You're feeling! You gotta recognize, you gotta be aware, that you're alive! That a leaf, a flower, this gentleman, they're beautiful! I mean, there's no reason why we couldn't explore each other's psyche in this moment in time, and find great beauty in that!

The idea that we are superior and we have dominion over nature? It’s an illusion. We’re all connected. If something breaks in this scheme of life, we’re all affected, as we can see it happening now. We’re on the edge. There are discoveries in science every day that are profound and yet we’re on the edge of disaster with global warming. [His dog starts barking.] That dog, for example, is following its intuition to guard; it’s a Doberman watching the street below it. Max, Max, that’s enough! [laughs]. You can see that dog just listened to me — they’re talking to us. The intelligence level of everything is enormous, we just think they’re dumb because they don’t communicate like we do. Octopus are highly intelligent and, in all likelihood, talking to each other.

Honeybirds have learned that if they lead native peoples to hives of honey, [those people] take a portion of that hive, leave some for the bees but also some for the birds. The birds have learned that if they guide human beings to the hive, they’ll get a reward. Birds, stemming from dinosaurs, millions of years of existence, they’ve evolved their own intelligence, and suddenly birds and humans are interacting. One flies and the other walks, but they’re communicating. What a miraculous thing. Apes can react to computers. I once talked to Koko the Gorilla in San Francisco. The world is alive with stories of interactions of animals and human beings. I’ve been asked to do another album already [by the label]. I don’t know if it’s a continuation of these kinds of stories, or, it occurred to be this morning, but an album of love stories involving animals. Think of a wolf howling on a winter night. They’re talking. It’s a love story. There’s a whole dialogue going on. There’s a plethora of stories out there of animals communicating to each other. We’re in the midst, right now, of working on interpreting sperm whale songs. They have computers analyzing the variations in their songs, and they’re communicating: “Hello”; “I love you”; “I’m here”; Where are you?” We know meerkats have a dialogue and they have different names for different people they see. They’re actually talking to each other. What doesn’t communicate? Do you think a chipmunk or a squirrel that’s chattering isn’t saying something? The world is singing a song of love and life and communication and we humans, until recently — except for a lot of native people — were deaf to this communication. Everything is alive and intelligent if only we have the ears, the eyes and the sensibility to recognize that.

We’re so overwhelmed, especially nowadays, with existing. We find it hard to remember the rest of the world which has its own miracle of existence. We’ve heard so many times that global warming can wipe out human beings, but given a short period of time, the earth can renew and something else could take our place, if that was the case.

I went up into space [in 2021] and came down. I was weeping after and I didn’t know why. Then I realized, there was sorrow – I was mourning the earth that I saw. What I’m realizing now is that there’s a fervent amount of work being done by scientists around the world to come up with a solution to global warming: to take the carbon dioxide and methane out of the air, to take the plastics out of the ocean, to purify our water and different farming techniques. We abound with knowledge of how to save the earth. It’s amazing what science is doing right now. If we can hang on for a while, science may absolve us of things it created in the first place.

I’m in the same boat as everybody else. The solution is human beings wanting to do something about it. To have a political group saying it doesn’t exist is like sitting in the electric chair and saying the electricity is going to go out. It’s absurd. The first thing we need is all of humanity to say, “My God, we’re approaching the end, we have to do something about it, united.”

and it turns out it's a reference to those tweets from 2020 about how he thinks people can call themselves whatever they want, says he doesn't like labeling himself, asks others not to assume his sexuality, and that he doesn't use cis to self-describe and objects to being called cis because it seems it's being used as a slur when it's directed at him.

He's also said,

Happy 95th, William Shatner.