feature story
KEN BURNS’ PBS DOCUMENTARY ASKS HARD QUESTIONS ABOUT
How Americans Treated Jews
and Immigrants During Wartime
BY ANDREW LAPIN | JTA.ORG
20 SEPTEMBER 15, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Burns with a request: Would he consider making a fi lm
about America during the Holocaust?
Burns and his longtime collaborators, Botstein and
Novick, along with writer Geoff rey C. Ward, had
already considered such a project. Th eir 2007 miniseries
about World War II and their 2014 project about the
Roosevelts covered historical periods that overlapped
with the Holocaust but did not explore the subject in
depth — and their makers recognized the gap.

Produced in partnership with the USC Shoah
Foundation, and drawing on the latest research about
the time period, the resulting six-hour series explores
the events of the Holocaust in granular detail. But it
also chronicles the xenophobic and antisemitic climate
in America in the years leading up to the Nazi genocide
of Europe’s Jews: a nation largely hostile to any kind of
refugee, particularly Jewish ones, and reluctant to inter-
vene in a war on their behalf.

Th e series paints a picture of a country largely failing
the century’s greatest moral crisis, through a combi-
nation of bureaucratic ineptitude, political skittishness
and open bigotry emanating from the streets to the
most vaunted chambers of power — while a handful of
heroes, working mostly on the sidelines, succeeded in
helping small numbers of people.

“Th ere was a way, because we were relating it to the
U.S., that you could get a diff erent and perhaps fresher
kind of picture,” Burns said. “Th e United States doesn’t
do anything, and then all of a sudden it does. Th ey’re
bad guys, and then they’re good guys.”
Th e fi lmmakers hope such a message will have mod-
ern resonance, especially as it arrives in a very diff er-
ent world from the one in which work on it began:
amid a growing climate of authoritarian governments,
right-wing extremism, Holocaust denialism and fi erce
debates over how to frame American history in the
classroom. For these reasons and more, Burns said, “I will never
work on a more important fi lm.”
Th e fi lm was an especially personal journey for
Botstein and Novick, who are both Jewish. Botstein’s
father (Bard College President Leon Botstein) was
born in Switzerland in 1946, to two Polish Jews who
had met in medical school in Zurich and later came to
the United States as refugees. She is a fi rst-generation
American and said making the fi lm helped her better
understand her family’s survival.

“My grandmother used to say to me: ‘If someone
shook you in the middle of the night, what would you
say? Are you an American? Are you a Jew? Are you a
woman? Are you Sarah?’” Botstein said. “Because her
identity had defi ned everything that ever happened to
her, and I didn’t have that experience living in a fairly
liberal part of New York State.”
Novick, meanwhile, was raised in the United States,
in a secular Jewish family that had already been here
for generations. For her, the project was eye-opening in
a diff erent way.

“I understand better now, I think, the world that my
grandparents, or sometimes great-grandparents, grew
up in, and how antisemitic America really was,” she said.

Like most projects by Florentine Films, Burns’ pro-
duction company, “Th e U.S. And Th e Holocaust” tells
its story with copious historical documents — in this
case, photographs, letters and newsreel footage — oft en
read aloud by celebrities, including Meryl Streep, Liam
Neeson, Hope Davis and Werner Herzog. Th ey voice the
stories of Frank and others like him who sought refuge in
the United States but died in gas chambers and concen-
tration camps instead.

Library of Congress via JTA.org
O ne of the fi rst people introduced in Ken Burns’
new documentary series about the Holocaust is
Otto, a Jewish man seen in the series’ fi rst episode
who tries to secure passage to America for his family but
gets stymied by the country’s fi erce anti-immigration
legislation. It isn’t until the third episode that viewers learn that
Otto’s daughter is nicknamed Anne, and the pieces
fall into place: He’s the father of Anne Frank, the
Holocaust’s most famous victim.

Burns calls the delayed detail a “hidden ball trick,”
hoping that an audience with only passing knowledge of
the Frank family will not immediately clue into the fact
that Otto was Anne’s father. Burns and his co-directors,
the Jewish fi lmmakers Sarah Botstein and Lynne Novick,
wanted their viewers to ponder the question of what the
U.S. government felt Anne’s life was worth when she was
still a living, breathing Jewish child and not yet a world-fa-
mous author and martyr of the human condition.

“It was important to us to look at a way in which you
can rearrange the familiar tropes so that you see: Th is
is a family that is getting the hell out of Germany, and
hoping eventually to put more distance between them
by going to the United States, which basically in the
majority of the citizens and in the policy of its govern-
ment does not want them,” Burns said.

Burns is the foremost documentarian of American his-
tory, with iconic works such as “Th e Civil War,” “Jazz” and
“Baseball” (where he explained the real hidden ball trick,
an on-fi eld sleight of hand), turning PBS programs into
must-see TV multiple times over the past four decades.

His latest, “Th e U.S. and the Holocaust,” premieres on the
public broadcaster Sept. 18 and will air over three nights.

Th e project took seven years to complete. In 2015,
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reached out to
Immigrants wait to be transferred at Ellis Island on Oct. 30, 1912.