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Focusing on America’s failures to save more Jews in the Holocaust unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today. Here’s how.
Among those excited by the announcement that America’s leading documentary filmmaker had produced a three-part series on the Holocaust were sectors of the Jewish community that have long insisted on the need for all Americans to learn about this subject. Who better suited for this task than Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, known for their well-crafted, carefully researched historical projects? Not only could they be expected to produce a reliable—if not definitive—treatment of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, The U.S. and the Holocaust would also bring the subject home, answering a question that lay at the heart of the matter: why should Americans, specifically, care about this genocide?
Aired on PBS in early September, the series’ episodes were duly admired by critics for their content, their staging, and their message. Of central significance, it was said, Burns, Novick, and Botstein had effectively dramatized America’s shameful failure to help save the European Jews from the fate awaiting them.
In this connection, Exhibit A was the futile attempt made by Anne Frank’s family in Amsterdam, who could easily have been accommodated in the United States, to secure a visa. One was introduced to the various internal American forces, some actively pro-Nazi but many simply opposed to foreign intervention, that had delayed an active American response to Hitler’s mission, as well as to the domestic conditions, political and economic, that worked against admitting Jewish refugees to the country. Altogether, this showcasing of Anne’s iconic status as the most famous chronicler and moving exemplar of the millions of Jews hunted, betrayed, and systematically killed made it seem that America itself, by refusing a visa, had been party to her and their fate.
The Public Broadcasting Service’s regular appeal for support to “Viewers Like You” speaks not just to those who contribute financially but to a much larger audience that is assumed to share its views and values. Burns, Novick, and Botstein, who are not historians or political thinkers but filmmakers who satisfy that audience, have mirrored their eagerness to do good and to atone for past iniquities.