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.




National Archives in Krakow via JTA.org
National Archives and Records Administration
National Archives and Records Administration via JTA.org
It is also supplemented by extensive
interviews with Holocaust survivors and
historians, most prominently Deborah
Lipstadt, an infl uential Holocaust scholar
and the State Department’s special envoy
on antisemitism. Lipstadt delivers what
the directors saw as the fi lm’s most haunt-
ing conclusion: that the Nazis achieved
their goal of permanently crippling the
global Jewish population, which has not
been fully replenished in the decades
since the Holocaust.

Th e American focus means the fi lm
takes 30 minutes to arrive in Germany.

Th e timeline begins not with Adolf
Hitler’s rise to power but with the
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, an American
law that set national quotas on all immi-
grants to the country and would come
to factor heavily into U.S. refugee policy
during Europe’s mass expulsion of Jews.

Th e fi lmmakers take a wide sweep in
establishing the racist political climate of
the time, discussing the Chinese Exclusion
Act of the 19th century; Th eodore
Roosevelt’s love of eugenics; Henry Ford’s
public campaign of antisemitism; and Jim
Crow laws, which rendered Black people
second-class citizens and which Hitler
would eventually draw from when craft -
ing his own race laws.

“To set the table meant we had to go
pretty far back,” Novick said.

Th e chronological approach places
particular emphasis on what had
already transpired in Europe by the time
Americans got signifi cantly involved: the
“Holocaust by bullets,” for example, in
which more than 1.5 million of what
would ultimately be 6 million dead Jews
were slaughtered by gunfi re and dumped
in mass graves throughout Nazi-occupied
Eastern Europe before the concentration
camps were even constructed.

As it details the horrors unfolding
in Europe, the fi lm focuses on the rise
of Nazi-sympathizer movements on
the homefront, including the America
First Committee, and breaks down the
tensions within the State Department,
where antisemitic offi cials in positions of
power undermined eff orts to intervene
diplomatically on the behalf of Jews.

Th e fi lm also discusses divisions
within the American Jewish commu-
nity over whether to let in so many
Jewish refugees. Twenty-fi ve percent of
American Jews at the time didn’t want
to let any more in, some because they
looked down on the Eastern European
refugees as poor and unassimilated, and
others because they were scared of mak-
ing life worse for the Jews still in Europe
if they spoke out too forcefully.

“It took me a while to really get my
mind around the idea that there was a
A German policeman checks the identifi cation papers of Jewish people in
the Krakow, Poland, in 1941.

Members of the Sturmabteilung or SA — a Nazi paramilitary organization
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 9, 1943
signifi cant voice within a powerful Jewish
American community that [believed]
we shouldn’t say too much because it
will just stir the pot and awaken more
antisemitism,” Novick said.

Th ere were heroes on the homefront,
too, and the fi lm relays their stories.

Varian Fry and Raoul Wallenberg,
who traveled to Europe to rescue as many
Jews as they could, are depicted, as are
the eff orts of the U.S. War Refugee Board
and American diplomats such as John
Paley. Th e advocacy of fi gures such as Jan
Karski, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Ben Hecht
and Peter Bergson is also spotlighted.

To depict the history, the fi lmmakers
relied heavily on their advisory board
(they have one for every project they
take on) to determine how much time
to devote to various historical events,
whether to show certain images or merely
describe them and how to describe them.

“We don’t go anywhere without our
board of advisors,” Botstein said.

For “Th e U.S. and the Holocaust,” the
advisers included Holocaust historians
such as Debórah Dwork, Peter Hayes and
Richard Breitman, as well as scholars of
race history such as Nell Irvin Painter,
Mae M. Ngai and Howard Bryant.

Oft en the advisers disagreed on how
to depict moments in history, and this
disagreement is sometimes refl ected in
the fi lm itself. A debate over whether
the United States should have bombed
Auschwitz, or even the trains leading
into the death camp, echoed in the advis-
ers’ room just as much as it did in the
highest levels of government in the war’s
waning months. Th e fi lm reproduces
those debates, quoting from historians
who argue both points.

Th e fi lm’s treatment of Franklin D.

Roosevelt is also notable given Burns’
demonstrated interest in the U.S.

president. Many historians today fault Roosevelt
for failing to take more decisive action to
prevent further bloodshed at key moments
in the war. Th e director noted that the
new series is more critical of FDR’s actions
during the Holocaust than his earlier
series “Th e Roosevelts” was, but Burns
still believes the president was mostly act-
ing within his means as a politician. “He
could not wave a magic wand,” he said.

“He was not the emperor or a king.”
All Burns fi lms are released with teach-
ing guides and are intended for use in the
classroom, but getting “Th e U.S. and the
Holocaust” into schools was of particular
importance to the fi lmmakers because
they saw an opportunity to fi t it into the
dozens of statewide Holocaust education
mandates that have been passed.

And also, Novick said, because the
fi lmmakers have noticed the rise of var-
ious far-right, white supremacist ideolo-
gies, including many fi gures who espouse
Holocaust denial. “It’s a never-ending
battle that has to be fought,” she said.

Th e fi lm itself doesn’t engage with such
denialists. In their publicity for the fi lm, Burns
and company are partnering with sev-
eral organizations to try to bring the
Holocaust’s lessons into the modern
day, including the International Rescue
Committee, a refugee aid agency, and
the U.S. government-funded think tank
Freedom House.

Th e producers asked JTA not to give
away the details of the fi lm’s ending — an
unusual request for a Holocaust docu-
mentary. But the reason is that Burns
and his team don’t end with the camps’
liberation in 1945. Instead, they come up
to the present, in unexpected ways.

“Most of our fi lms come up to the
present,” Burns said. “And we would be
remiss if we did not take on this most
gargantuan of topics, and not say that this
is rhyming so much with the present.”
When asked why the fi lm makes
some of the connections it makes, Burns
quoted a line Lipstadt delivers in the fi lm:
“If ‘the time to stop a Holocaust is before
it happens,’ then it means you have to lay
on the table the ingredients that go into
it. Maybe these ingredients don’t add up
to it ... But if you’re seeing people assem-
bling, in the kitchen, the same ingredi-
ents, you’ve got to say; you cannot wait
until the meal is prepared.” JE
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