The Free Press
Honestly with Bari Weiss
America's Role in the Holocaust: Ken Burns on The Most Important Film He Will Ever Make
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America's Role in the Holocaust: Ken Burns on The Most Important Film He Will Ever Make
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Ken Burns is the most famous documentary filmmaker in America. He has made 35 films over the past 5 decades on historical and cultural subjects like the Civil War (which is the most streamed film in public television history), baseball, jazz, the Roosevelts, Jefferson, Vietnam, Benjamin Franklin, the Statue of Liberty, Muhammad Ali... and many, many more. But of his most recent film, The U.S. and The Holocaust, he said: "I will never work on a film more important than this one."

Even if you've seen many movies or read many books on the Holocaust, Burns' new film, which focuses on the U.S.'s response to the worst genocide in human history—what America did and didn't do, could have done and didn't, and the way the Nazis derived inspiration from ideas popular in America at the time—is bound to both horrify and surprise.

So today, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I talk to Burns about why a filmmaker of American history takes on the Holocaust and what this dark period of history tells us about the chasm between America's ideals and our actual reality. And later, we get into an intense and rich discussion about the responsibilities of telling American history, the uses and misuses of the Holocaust as a political metaphor, and what pitfalls we face when drawing parallels between history and now.

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While I am extremely disturbed about the Holocaust, as is most everyone today, and would have been interested in seeing this film, I am completely turned off by what the described ending turned out to be. Another America bashing and right-wing fear mongering film. So disappointing!

The parallels made between the current right wing and the holocaust are fundamentally dishonest. There may be some small fringe groups on the right who are anti-Semitic but those groups have zero chance of gaining national power in the US. There is also no genocide or enslavement being committed against any group of people, in the US or the world, by the right-wing.

Also, trying to associate the current immigration issues to what happened back then is just disgusting. It makes me sad to know that the US could have done more to allow the victims of the holocaust entrance in our country and didn’t. I don’t know enough about the details of our current immigration laws but I am fairly certain that the laws have changed to allow asylum seekers to come here without question, which are probably the result of what happened back then. Those laws are now being mis-used by anyone wanting to come in. All anyone has to say to enter our country is that they are asylum seekers and they allowed in. I am for immigration but not open borders. People who have been trying to come here legally can’t come in but people who come here illegally can come in. That’s just not fair. Demonizing my opinion as being evil and racist is completely wrong.

From what I can tell, there is a much larger anti-Semitic movement happening on the left, on college campuses and by blacks. There are even open, celebrated, anti-Semite’s serving in our congress right now, not on the right, but on the left. I’m sure that was not mentioned in the film.

If the film was being pro-human, a more honest parallel of the theme of the film, where the world (America) knew what was happening and ignored it, would be the current treatment of Uighurs in China and North Koreans my the leader of their country.

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Sooooo disappointing Bari. Why did you give the left a complete pass? Not a single question about the rise of antisemitism on our college campuses? NYU, a bastion of intellectuals, actively hating on Jews. Btw, he didn't mention Israel because he supports BDM and the Palestinians. Keep in mind Eugenics in 1920s USA was promoted by the intellectual left but no one even mentions that fact.

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