While trolling around archive.org, I found brief interview from 1967 with Leonard Nimoy, the first-ever TV Vulcan. It's interesting enough. The interviewer doesn't appear to understand much about Star Trek, which is not surprising for the time. It's fun to hear her trying to get Nimoy to explain how transporters work. I understand the standard answer was, 'Very well, thank you. Next question…'

Further exploration yielded an even better – though longer – interview with a much older Nimoy. The Wexler Oral History Project is part of the Yiddish Book Center's laudable effort to preserve Jewish diaspora culture and the Yiddish language. As Elektra said, somewhat tearfully, it's sad when a language approaches extinction, taking with it the memories of an entire culture. Nimoy, whose parents escaped from pogroms in the Ukraine, grew up in Boston. He's got tales to tell, and you can view the whole two-hour interview here. Or, you can skip to about 55 minutes in, and listen to the actor's fascinating tale of the connection between the Vulcan salute and an Orthodox Jewish hand gesture. The tale is widely known now, but wasn't back in the 1960s.

I remember discovering this fact independently back in the early 1980s. I was having a lesson in 'Ivrit-Teitsch', a form of 18th-century Yiddish, at the Martin Buber Institute in Cologne, Germany. My professor had insisted on holding the class, even though I was the only one who signed up for it. I thought that was amazing of him. Knowing that I wasn't Jewish, my professor took great care to initiate me into any mysteries he thought a goy might not know about. One of these was the blessing of the Kohanim, which he demonstrated. When he asked me if I could 'do this' – and held up his hand in the Vulcan salute – I almost fell out of my chair. Yes, I stammered. Then he told me about the blessing. Of course, I kept completely mum about Vulcans, because I didn't know how he'd take it. But I had my private suspicions about Mr Nimoy's inspiration, now confirmed by his very entertaining story.

Leonard Nimoy demonstrates here why science fiction can be valuable: it gets us to think about things like culture. Sometimes, as with the Vulcan salute, it helps us to understand people better. Other times, not so much. We can get so much wrong culturally that it's embarrassing. Take the sexism in early Star Trek. Please, seriously, take it away…

In this archive.org mashup, you can see what some very annoyed feminists think about Captain Kirk et al.

To boldly go where no oral historian has gone before…