”The U.S. and the Holocaust” with Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

Closing out our Emmy coverage, today we feature Ken Burns (“Brooklyn Bridge”, “The Civil War”, “Jazz”) and Lynn Novick (“Frank Lloyd Wright”, “Baseball”, “Hemingway”) discussing their thrice-Emmy nominated “The U.S. and the Holocaust”. As Ken tells us, this PBS series addresses the “Holocaust, one of the low points of humanity and what Americans knew and what they didn't know, what they did, and more importantly, what they didn't do.”

Ken and Lynn first explain why they start with the story of Anne Frank and her family, and how it reveals how we often don’t fully understand the American context of such stories. They speak with Mike about the deep anti-immigrationist and antisemitic feelings of America between the world wars. They explain in particular how Eugenics was used to buttress the laws severely limiting immigration, especially from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe–the latter being where most of the world’s Jews then lived. They go on to explain how American Eugenics, along with the ideology of Manifest Destiny and even Jim Crow laws influenced the Nazis and gave them a template for their atrocities. And they discuss some of what Ken calls “the points of light” in this most horrific time: Some of the Americans–singularly or in organizations–who stepped up to help Jews escape.

Throughout, as the series shows the depths of the Nazi horrors and the failure of the U.S.--with the notable exception of winning the war–to muster a meaningful response, it demonstrates the importance of maintaining what writer Daniel Mendelsohn calls “the particularity” of the stories of those who died and those who survived.

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