Jewish immigrants headed to America                                                            Corbis



The Jewish Americans:
A Series by David Grubin
PBS
January 9, 16, and 23

Writer-director David Grubin’s six-hour survey of American Jewry’s 350-year history isn’t thematically or technically boundary-pushing, and no one familiar with the basic outline of events will learn of any newly uncovered episodes. But Grubin has produced more than 100 films, and his pacing, writing, research, and use of archival materials are all confident and first rate.

In the wrong hands, such viewing might seem 350 years long itself, but Grubin manages to make it enlightening and entertaining both. Skillfully, if sometimes a bit arbitrarily, he focuses on well-known figures –- Hank Greenberg, Henry Morgenthau, Bess Myerson, Justice Louis Brandeis, Irving Berlin, and so on -- to illustrate views and trends. A varied group of talking heads, from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to comedian Carl Reiner to University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, link the history to today’s culture.

The series is divided into three parts. The first chronicles colonial Jews’ arrival in New Amsterdam.(The first group of 23 had fled from Brazil during the Inquisition. Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to keep them out, but his superiors in Amsterdam overruled him, arguing that the Jews would contribute to the economy.)

The segment follows the Jews' establishment of the first American synagogue, the 19th-century wave of German-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, the split among Jews (as among all Americans) during the Civil War, and the early 20th-century Jewish hub in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Civil War portion achieves narrative traction through the stories of Judah Benjamin, a slave owner and secretary of state and war for the Confedederacy who was scapegoated by his fellow Southerners when the tide turned in favor of the Union. On the Union side, Grubin follows soldier Marcus Spiegel, whose brother would go on to found the Spiegel Catalogue Company.

The class divide not just between Jews and Americans of other religions, but among Jews themselves, are exemplified in labor struggles, and the hideous tragedy of the Triangle garment-factory fire, in which 146 young immigrants (mostly Jewish and mostly women) died in the blaze or plummeted to their deaths in an effort to escape.

The second night of the series delves into the interwar period in which Jews became an often assimilated part of society, but were still routinely discriminated against, as in the university quota system; terrorized, as in the prosecution and persecution of Leo Frank; and railed against by the likes of overt bigots like Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh. Justice Ginsburg understatedly recollects how she and fellow Jews in college faced de facto segregation from their gentile classmates.

Grubin brings home how terrifying it must have been to be Jewish (or African-American, or Catholic) in the heyday of the Klan. The segment also conveys the frustration of striving to be heard by a Roosevelt administration that was too fatalistic about the pace of thwarting the Nazi Final Solution. (Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's efforts on behalf of refugees are presented as too little too late.)

It did seem that Grubin treads lightly on the topic of Jewish crime figures, mentioning the Jewish gangster scene almost in passing. Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel would feel slighted being so outshone by Yiddish theater figures and the Henry Street Settlement. But heck, those guys get enough play in feature films, yes?

The third night describes Jews’ postwar push to the suburbs, their involvement in political causes including Zionism, civil rights, and the fight for Soviet Jewry, and their spiritual and artistic experimentation, whether it be transplanted Borscht Belt humor like Mel Brooks’s 2,000-year-old man or a Hassidic Reggae rapper from upstate New York.

In general, the series treats violence -- illustrations of Russian pogroms or news footage of the liberation of German death camps -- tastefully and delicately enough to allow for school viewing while making the horrors clear enough. Grubin maintains perspective on the fact that the Jews were but one of many immigrant streams, and the program manages to outline respectfully the tenets of various Jewish religious approaches, from Hassidic to Reform-Buddhist, while also acknowledging American Jewry’s broad secular and atheistic strata.

The ambivalence of an affluent and assimilated Jewish-American colonist toward her intermarrying children strikes an eerily contemporary chord. I also loved San Francisco Symphony Director Michael Tilson Thomas’s commentary on his grandfather, a star of New York’s Yiddish theater, and Mandy Patinkin’s interpretation of Irving Berlin’s American standard “Blue Skies” as a Yiddish tune in disguise.

A contemporary rabbi casts the struggle of today's Jews as one of foggy identity in an era when they're not overtly hated. It's easy to define yourself when you're despised, he says -- you're a victim. But when you're not, you need to figure out who you are by choice -- a luxurious but still difficult task.

The rabbi's is a thought-provoking notion. But when a Columbia University professor is greeted with a swastika and a high-profile policy book sets out to prove that the Israel lobby is too powerful, I can't help but wonder if the rabbi's sentiment is a bit premature. Or maybe my sort of anxiety, hovering just beneath even a relatively calm era, is part of the Jewish-American identity.

In any case, Grubin and PBS have produced a sweeping and satisfying project that could well serve as an introduction to, or a review of, a rich, dynamic, and often tense history.