Television’s Most Ordinary, and Most Unusual, Orthodox Jew

In an episode of the short-lived science-fiction series Firefly, viewers are introduced to a character named Amnon, clad in the yarmulke and ritual fringes of an observant Jew. Amnon is a benevolent minor character who works at an interplanetary post office; no mention is made of his religion or ethnicity, and he never appears in subsequent episodes. As Yair Rosenberg has uncovered, the actor who played him—Al Pugliese, who died this summer at the age of seventy-four—was at the time deeply engaged in studying Judaism, so as to better understand the roots of Christianity. The subject remained a lifelong passion for Pugliese.