This story boasted a rare television appearance by acclaimed Yiddish theater actor
Joseph Buloff (1899-1985). Buloff played patient David Klesmer, the elderly Jewish sage who shares a salient passage from the Mishnah with the young angst-ridden Tod Marriott. Klesmer's previous television appearance was in 1964 on the medical drama
Ben Casey (1961), and over a decade would pass before his next appearance on screen in
Reds (1981). Buloff was born in Vilnius, Lithuania as Jozef Bulow. Buloff's character name of Klesmer, cleverly conceived by this episode's German-Jewish writer
Shimon Wincelberg, is the name for the traditional music of Eastern European Jews that is a staple of the Yiddish theater where Buloff found his fame.