PBS’s ‘Jewish Americans’ wants for lasting significance
By Michael Fox
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Spanning three nights, six hours and 350 years, the PBS series “The Jewish Americans,” which began airing on Jan. 9, is an ambitious project by any measure. And yet, despite the swath it cuts through the January TV schedule, it is not a program of lasting significance.
Filmmaker David Grubin concocts a blend of factual, sociological and anecdotal (or oral) history that is always interesting, occasionally fascinating, but rarely revelatory. That might be the best one could hope for, given that the series has to be accessible to non-Jewish audiences without being so superficial that it turns off Jewish viewers.
“The Jewish Americans” is consistently intelligent—although occasionally bewildering in what it emphasizes or skips—but lacks daring. Grounded by an adherence to chronology and an insistence on soft-pedaling controversy, it will neither rile nor inspire anyone not already heavily tilted either way.
The choice of title (as opposed to “The American Jews’) encapsulates the program’s thesis that immigrant Jews adapted and subjected their Judaism to American mores while making major contributions to the nation’s development. The critical dance between identity and assimilation is referenced a hundred different times over the course of the series, but the punch is almost always watered down.
After noting that Jews first came to North America, to New Amsterdam, from Brazil in 1654, and that for some time in the 19th century Charleston, S.C., was home to America’s largest Jewish community, “The Jewish Americans” (narrated by actor Liev Schreiber without a wisp of ethnicity) hops a train to New York after the first hour to catch the wave of immigrants that flooded Ellis Island from 1880 to 1920.
The most compelling detail is mentioned in passing: The established, assimilated and accepted Jews, mostly German, by and large looked down on the unwashed masses of poor Russian and Eastern European Jews. They didn’t want to be identified with the unschooled ruffians, hustlers, criminals and boors who crammed the Lower East Side. (One might see a parallel in the attitude toward Soviet Jews who immigrated in the last 20 years, but it isn’t broached in the celebratory segment in the final episode.
The second night (“The Best of Times, The Worst of Times”) does the great service of reminding contemporary viewers of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism (although it barely mentions Father Coughlin, who surely reached as many people with his radio slurs). The trial of Leo Frank in Atlanta in 1915, and his lynching, is presented as evidence for Jews in the South and beyond that assimilation was an illusion.
“The Jewish Americans” loses some of its freshness in the final two-hour episode, “Home,” perhaps because the events of the last 60 years are so familiar to us.
Grubin could have opted to inject a blast of heat and unpredictability by focusing on issues currently galvanizing the Jewish community—intermarriage, the gulf between secular and ultra-religious Jews, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But “The Jewish Americans” is not remotely interested in ruffling feathers.
Even at six hours, “The Jewish Americans” necessarily omits key figures or events. Every viewer will have quibbles, but it’s ridiculous to devote so many sequences to popular culture without mentioning the Jewish influence on American intellectual life. Novelists Meyer Levin, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Stanley Elkin and Joseph Heller—not to mention scientist Albert Einstein and economist Leo Strauss—deserve more than their snapshot (if that) flitting across the screen.
Alas, David Grubin’s tele-version of American Jewish history is the only one we will have for a long time.
The final episode of “The Jewish Americans” airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 23 on PBS.