America is forgetting the Holocaust. Only that concern can account for the extraordinary investment that our nation’s premier documentarian, Ken Burns, and its premier cultural arbiter, PBS, made in the production and promotion of the three-part series The U.S. and the Holocaust. Clocking in at a daunting 395 minutes—quite a number in an era when the average attention span runs much shorter—the series is one of the most extensive treatments of this tragedy ever done in America. PBS’s formidable school-distribution engine will ensure that the extensive educational material that it prepared along with the film (clips for students, a full hour with the filmmakers for teachers) will make it into classrooms nationwide. Churches and many Jewish groups have lauded it and are hosting special showings. Burns himself has been leading the effort since the series premiered in September. “I will not work on a more important film in my lifetime,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Driven, as Burns explained, by their concern “as citizens” over recent events—“the killing of people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, rising xenophobia, and nationalist sentiment”—he and his team even managed to advance the film’s premiere to September 2022 from an original debut date in 2023, evidence of both Burns’s conviction and his clout with PBS.
