Jewish Americans: PBS series explores a people's rich, influential history, dating back to Colonial times, and profiles key modern figures
"The Jewish Americans" airs in three 2-hour segments on PBS on Wednesday, Jan. 16 and 23.
Numbers can't begin to summarize the story of "The Jewish Americans," a multilayered PBS documentary that airs in segments on three Wednesdays beginning next Wednesday. But some of them do stand out like signposts in the 350 years of social, religious, political, economic and cultural history covered in the six-hour series. The numbers affirm certain widely familiar patterns about the immigration, assimilation and identity of Jews in American life. They also point the viewer in some unexpected new directions.
In 1654, at the start of writer/director David Grubin's timeline, a boat carrying 23 Jewish refugees landed at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. More than a century later, in 1776, 2,500 Jews lived in the American colonies, which then had a total population of 2.5 million. Seven thousand Jewish soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War and 3,000 for the Confederacy. By the 1870s, some 250,000 Jews had fanned out across the country. A half million American Jews fought in World War II.
Such figures anchor a theme that Grubin explores in various ways: The story of Jewish life in America is a steady drumbeat of assimilation and integration with the broader American narrative. Xenophobia, anti-Semitism and ongoing questions about Jewish distinctiveness have certainly occluded, complicated and enriched that forward pulse. But as University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann puts it, in one of many encomia in the series to the fusion of Jewish liberation and the American dream, "To be Jewish in America today is to be as free as a Jew has ever been in the modern world."...
Read entire article at San Francisco Chronicle
Numbers can't begin to summarize the story of "The Jewish Americans," a multilayered PBS documentary that airs in segments on three Wednesdays beginning next Wednesday. But some of them do stand out like signposts in the 350 years of social, religious, political, economic and cultural history covered in the six-hour series. The numbers affirm certain widely familiar patterns about the immigration, assimilation and identity of Jews in American life. They also point the viewer in some unexpected new directions.
In 1654, at the start of writer/director David Grubin's timeline, a boat carrying 23 Jewish refugees landed at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. More than a century later, in 1776, 2,500 Jews lived in the American colonies, which then had a total population of 2.5 million. Seven thousand Jewish soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War and 3,000 for the Confederacy. By the 1870s, some 250,000 Jews had fanned out across the country. A half million American Jews fought in World War II.
Such figures anchor a theme that Grubin explores in various ways: The story of Jewish life in America is a steady drumbeat of assimilation and integration with the broader American narrative. Xenophobia, anti-Semitism and ongoing questions about Jewish distinctiveness have certainly occluded, complicated and enriched that forward pulse. But as University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann puts it, in one of many encomia in the series to the fusion of Jewish liberation and the American dream, "To be Jewish in America today is to be as free as a Jew has ever been in the modern world."...