"This is mere political propaganda, an imposture of moral authority rather than the real thing. It contaminates and poisons the moral message."
The American Spectator | USA News and Politics . . ."The story of America and the Holocaust has been told well before. The 1994 PBS program America and the Holocaust, part of The American Experience series, already went over much of the ground covered here, having learned from many of the innovations Burns had introduced into documentary film and video. That earlier show, if anything, was more pointed and unsparing than Burns is in portraying America’s role in denying shelter and protection to Europe’s Jews as the horror of the Nazi genocide fell upon them, step by step. Spurred by the scholarship of historian David Wyman, that show was unsparing of Franklin Roosevelt, of official American complacency, and of the ineffectuality of the establishment American Jewish organizations. It was unsparing of liberals and conservatives alike, and thereby established its moral credentials.
"Burns retells that story, though with a lighter hand on FDR. Fair enough. As far as that goes, it was excellent.
"But Burns stumbled badly in trying to preach a moral lesson at the end. Not that such a lesson could not or should not be made. As mentioned, America and the Holocaust succeeded in drawing a searing moral lesson by its even-handed presentation of the faults of the actors of that day and allowed the viewers to connect that and apply that to the politics of the moment as they would be moved. That show trusted its viewers and their conscience.
"It is not that any attempt to directly and forthrightly connect a moral lesson learned from history to the politics of the day must fail. It is only that it runs the risk of exposing political bias in such a way that the moral lesson becomes muddled, compromised, and made subservient to a political vision that is not the same as the moral vision it likes to claim it is. And here is where Burns has failed.". . .
Ken Burns’ film ‘The US and the Holocaust’ erases the American Jewish masses - JNS.org
*Although ignored by Burns, massive numbers of American (and British) Jews from the working- and lower-middle classes vehemently demanded that Britain “open the gates of Palestine” to Jews fleeing persecution. On March 23, 1933, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States (JWV) presented an appeal at the British consulate in New York that called on the British government to set aside restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. In November, Pierre van Paassen, whose column was widely syndicated in American newspapers, endorsed honorary president of the American Jewish Congress Rabbi Stephen Wise’s call for settling 150,000 German Jews in Palestine, but warned that unless such a plan were carried out at once, “there will be no 150,000 German Jews left to settle in Palestine.” As America kept its doors shut, many Jews saw Mandatory Palestine as their best—or only—hope.
UPDATE: A Holocaust Mystery: Ken Burns Gets Lost in a Bermuda Triangle - The Lid (lidblog.com) . . ."The Bermuda Conference was one of the era’s most vivid demonstrations of the Roosevelt administration’s abandonment of the Jews, as well as a pivotal moment in stimulating stronger American Jewish protests against the Holocaust.
How, then, could Ken Burns have omitted any mention of Bermuda from his six-hour-long PBS series on “The U.S. and the Holocaust”? Was it because one of the themes of the series was to minimize President Roosevelt’s responsibility for America’s harsh refugee policy, and the Bermuda Conference conflicted with that narrative?
For now, this question remains a mystery. To date, no interviewer has asked Burns about this glaring omission, and he has not volunteered any comment. Is he hoping that, like ships disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle, his own Bermuda omission will vanish from public view before anyone notices?
