Ken Burns, whose name decorates assorted PBS documentaries like Ken Burns’ Civil War, Ken Burns’ Baseball, and Ken Burns’ Prohibition, now brings us Ken Burns’ The Holocaust.
Timed to extract maximum donations from liberal Jews around the High Holy Days, PBS is airing “The U.S. and the Holocaust” not to set the record straight, but to cover it up yet again by whitewashing the FDR administration and exploiting the Holocaust to call for open borders.
Jews and the Holocaust are nothing but useful talking points to Burns. His interest begins with the “slave trade” and concludes with the Capitol Riot. The message of the “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is that Republicans are the new Nazis, Burns is one of the heroes calling them out and Stephen Miller, Trump’s Jewish adviser, is the new Breckinridge Long, a Democrat Nazi sympathizer who used his position as an FDR crony to keep Jews out of America.
Not that Burns is willing to indict FDR. Instead, he fashionably blames Long and other staffers who were just doing FDR’s dirty work for him: turning his series into more revisionism. But telling the truth about FDR would also destroy the false binary on antisemitism that is the only reason that Burns decided to tackle the Holocaust. That and the pledge drive donations for PBS.
The only story about the Holocaust that Burns would make, PBS would air and liberals would buy is one in which conservatives are villains and liberals, including FDR, are heroes. And the Jews, unless they have the right politics, are the villains, while the two million illegals crossing the border are the new Jews. Burns combines revisionism and supersessionism in one.
All while exploiting the Holocaust to solicit donations for the High Holy Days pledge drive because at $1.1 million a year, PBS CEO Paula A Kerger just doesn’t make enough money.
The reason for his popularity is that Burns excels at telling his older liberal audience exactly what they already know at great length, flattering their sensibilities by pre chewing pop history. “The U.S. and the Holocaust” reduces the mass murder of six million Jews to racism and immigration, digesting the extended horror into contemporary woke talking points.
Billed as a groundbreaking look at America and the Holocaust, Ken Burns offers nothing but the same liberal pieties that indict conservatives while avoiding a closer look at liberal complicity. The American role in the Holocaust undeniably begins and ends with FDR. And the worshipful blank check that liberals, especially liberal Jews, offered the mastermind of the New Deal.
There were things that they didn’t know back then that have since been revealed.
FDR’s reaction to the Holocaust was nakedly antisemitic. In 1938, he responded to the state of Polish Jews by blaming them for controlling the economy. In November 1942, with the official exposure of the Holocaust underway, he suggested quotas for Jews to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews.”
After the Holocaust, FDR met with Ibn Saud. The Saudi king was accompanied by his “slaves, taster, astrologer, & 8 live sheep.” FDR assured the famously antisemitic monarch that “he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs”. He later told Congress “I learned more about the whole problem, the Muslim problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters.”
What were Saudi ruler’s views on the Jews?
Ibn Saud had called the Jews, “a race accursed by Allah according to his Koran, and destined to final destruction.”
“The word of Allah teaches us, and we implicitly believe this O Dickson, that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew ensures him an immediate entry into Paradise and into the august presence of Allah. What more then can a Muslim want in this hard world,” he vowed.
Before that, FDR had met with Stalin at Yalta. The two chummy socialists discussed what Roosevelt intended to offer Ibn Saud. “The President replied that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the six million Jews in the United States.”
Stalin had been following in Hitler’s footsteps by killing Jews. FDR was joking about the mass murder of America’s Jews with an antisemitic mass murderer. Or one hopes he was joking.
Why do FDR’s actions matter beyond the historical record? Generations later, liberal Jews continue to make excuses for more contemporary presidents like Obama and Biden when they sign off on Iran’s nuclear program and defend Islamic terrorists who murder Jews. When Jews are beaten in the streets of New York City or shot in Judea and Samaria, they look away.
Just like their grandparents who hung FDR’s picture on the wall and turned a deaf ear to the screams from the concentration camps did. That is why a historical reckoning is so vital.
In 1984, David S. Wyman, a non-Jewish history professor, wrote the explosive history, “The Abandonment of the Jews.” Rafael Medoff has carried on his work at the Wyman Institute with books like, “The Jews Should Keep Quiet“. Wyman demolished the familiar narrative that FDR had been a well-meaning leader who had his hands tied by Congress and by antisemitic staffers and was unable to let Jewish refugees in or bomb the rail lines leading to concentration camps.
Establishment historians responded to these revelations by doubling down on the “If Only Stalin Knew” version of history that exonerates FDR. Recent books like “FDR and the Jews” by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman try to contextualize FDR, depicting him as “compassionate but also pragmatic—struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions”. As Medoff demonstrates they do it by omitting FDR’s hatred of Jews.
There is a very good reason for doing that. FDR’s complicity in the Holocaust is also theirs.
The same liberal American Jews who rushed to give everything for the civil rights movement did next to nothing when six million Jews were murdered. And they went on worshiping FDR. They were willing to fight segregation and other progressive causes, but not the Holocaust, because they engage in such passionate activism to escape their Jewishness, not to articulate it.
“The U.S. and the Holocaust” quickly universalizes the Holocaust and replaces the Jews with illegal aliens. Ken Burns gives secular liberal Jews what they really want by remaking the Holocaust so that it’s no longer Jewish. Much as many Holocaust museums are already doing.
Burns offers the familiar version of the story in which everyone in the government except FDR was responsible for acts like sending the men, women and children on the St. Louis back to Europe to die. But the overall point of the three-part six-hour documentary series is that illegal aliens flooding across the border are the new Jews. And immigration policy is racist.
But it’s actually the leftists who are dismantling the entire asylum system that was built to make sure that refugees who face severe persecution and death are able to escape to America.
Open borders makes a mockery of refugee policies. And asylum has been turned into a sham in which migrants can claim to be “climate refugees” or flee high crime in their homelands, in which they can pass through a dozen countries before applying for asylum in the United States.
None of this looks anything like the Jews fleeing a world power’s plot to exterminate them.
Refugees genuinely escaping persecution are competing with economic migrants. Allowing economic migrants to pose as refugees destroys a lifeline that political dissidents, persecuted minorities, like Middle Eastern Christians, and people fleeing totalitarian regimes actually need.
It’s the Democrats who have once again dismantled the asylum system. And the backlash is likely to shut down all immigration regardless of whether the arrivals are persecuted or not.
That is the opposite of the lesson to be learned from Holocaust refugees.
The lesson of the Holocaust is not that countries shouldn’t have borders, it’s that stateless minorities, like the Jews, should have their own countries and borders. And it’s that there is a world of difference between economic migrants and refugees fleeing death.
The trouble with the remembrance of the Holocaust is not, as some say, that the world has learned nothing from it. No one should have expected otherwise. Ken Burns is the latest in a long line of ideologues appropriating the murder of six million Jews to push his pet agenda. The real tragedy is that American Jews, the people who have invested more energy than any other Jews in the world to memorialize the Holocaust, have learned nothing from it. And before the High Holy Days, they will watch PBS whitewash a liberal antisemite who thought the Jews deserved to die and then send in their donations so public television can demonize Israel.
Thanks Daniel, excellent article.
That reminded me, some people worshipped FDR, I guess it was during WW2, or maybe the Depression, they used to sit around and listen to his “Fireside Chats” on the radio on Friday nights or whenever it was. He was like their savior or God.
Radio was new at the time, FDR must have had a genius for using it. Looking it up just now, there were only 31 Fireside Chats in total, from 1933 to 1944, so less than one a month. And on varied days of the week.
This Burns movie is a falsification of history.
First, he had been hiding antisemitism of FDR and his efforts to limit Jewish immigration and deny help to Jews.
Second, since he didn’t want to tell the truth, what was the purpose of this movie?
This movie was created to claim that current economic migrants are just like Jews and the American immigration policy is just as bad as it had been for Jews.
But somehow Burns is not comparing Republicans who oppose open borders to FDR. He is comparing them to Hitler.
Holocaust historians pointed on a new strand of Holocaust deniers. These deniers compare everything that they oppose to Holocaust. If immigrants in America had been treated the same way as Jews had been treated by Nazis, then Nazis had been treating Jew the same way as Americans are treating illegal border crossers. Whatever you call that, it is not a Holocaust that Nazis had been accused of.
Conclusion: Ken Burns is a falsificator of history and a Holocaust denier.
Back to FDR. We can argue how many Jews any American president could admit. We can argue how much any bombardment of Auschwitz could help to save Jews. One thing is certain to me: one whisper by FDR into Churchill’s ear in 1940, would be enough for Britain to open Mandate Palestine to the Jewish immigration. Roosevelt didn’t want to save any Jews.
Two greatest things that FDR did: Selecting Truman as Vice-President and dying in April of 1945.
Without that Israel would not exist.
Good points.
Especially because the old fool had had the socialist Wallace as VP. Had Wallace stayed on the ticket, Moscow would’ve ended up dictating terms to U.S. foreign policy. (Declassified Venona decrypts further exonerated Sen. Joe McCarthy. Communist agents had indeed infiltrated our DNC run government.)
I’ve about had it with Burn’s endless blaming of conservatives for treatment of blacks and now for treatment of the Jews.
I will not be watching this pile of crap. And I will no longer watch any of the Burns” classics anymore.
This little liberal metrosexual is dead to me.
American Jewish leadership failed to produce the definitive film on the Holocaust which left the door open for the Ken Burns exploitation.
This is part of a deeper failure among most Jews. After the betrayals by Clinton, by Obama and Biden vs. the support from Donald Trump and the GOP U.S. Jews remain overwhelmingly in support of Democrats.
This is all the more disturbing when other minorities are waking up an leaving the Democrats. The Torah mentions a “mixed multitude” that also left Egypt at the time of the Jewish Exodus. They came to be know as “the Erev Rav” which blended in with the Jewish people and contaminated their spirit. This is why so many Jews cannot think and reason clearly when it comes to telling right from wrong and friend from foe.
Ken Burns is a secular lapsed Jew so he can twist the story as he wishes without any great consequence. He can always say- I am a Jew therefore I know what I’m talking about. We get the same story from American blacks that hide behind the radical leftism mask until its time to put on the black victim mask.
get your facts straight before you sound off. Burns is not Jewish. check wikipedia if you don’t believe me.
Burns is not Jewish, but his two wives were. He has become tedious, his style, once fresh, is now stale.
The one time I spoke to Ken Burns was at a lecture about his production of “The Civil War”; to congratulate him on a splendid job. “The Civil War” was and remains his masterpiece. Burns should have quit when he was ahead. He’s produces nothing comparable since. He also remains oblivious to the fact that PBS would *never let him* make the same series again. All those genial talks with Shelby Foote and his genteel sympathy for the “Lost Cause” Confederacy would be anathema today. They were the highlight of the project, but are simply no longer tolerable to the left.
Once again, another exposition that most Jews needn’t look any further than their reflection in the mirror to find the worst enemies of the Jewish people.
Daniel,
Thank you for this badly needed accurate review/correction of a distorted “Documentary.” on
a horrific time in Jewish history. Born in the 30’s, I well remember Jewish “Friends” coming to our Jewish home and hearing the phrase, “Roosevelt is our friend” many times over. My Father would take offense at thus propaganda and berate our visitors with the truth. This was not appreciated. However, my Father stood his ground against these sheep. Sadly, the majority of these sheep were German Jews with a limited perspective on reality. Hitler, Himmler, Gestapo. History repeats. Only the names change.
Mr. Burns is not a historian. He is subtle propagandist. His FDR is an imaginary FDR. He needs to study FDR carefully and truthfully bearing in mind Thucydides” statement that, “History is philosophy, teaching by example.”
Thank you again for the excellent article. Hopefully, many will take it to heart.
Never trust a clown who compares Trump and Desantis to Nazi’s
Excellent advice,, Mr. M.
In his 1933 inaugural address, FDR showed his hand, and he wasn’t even subtle about it. He railed about “the unscrupulous money changers” who could only propose “the lending of more money” as solution to theirs and the nation’s problems. To drive the point home, he continued with an analogy that America’s biblically literate population surely understood, “The money changers have fled their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.” Did Burns cover this, I wonder?
Oh, please. Regardless of Roosevelt’s opinion of Jews, the Nazis closed the borders of occupied Europe in 1940, so it was no longer an immigration issue. All America could do was win the War.
Oh, please. Regardless of Roosevelt’s opinion of Jews, Schicklegruber closed the borders of occupied Europe in 1940, so it was no longer an immigration issue. All America could do was win the War.
excellent analysis. daniel demonstrates again deep knowledge and keeping the target in his cross hairs
I agree with most of what I read here. I agree that it’s shameful that those like Ken Burns use the suffering of Jews during the Third Reich and the Holocaust to shame Americans to accepting illegal immigration. It’s unacceptable and should be condemned. This series wasn’t made to educate people about a sad moment in American history. It was made as an attempt to get Americans to support the open border policies of the Biden Administration. To use Holocaust victims as proxies in modern day political squabbles is appalling. This sort of thing SHOULD be criticized and I’m glad someone did that.
If I have a disagreement with this,it is that anti-semitism as the driving force behind the failure to bring more Jews to America. While I agree that anti-semitism played a role,it played only a small part. What happened was we were still mired in the Great Depression which meant most Americans weren’t interested in trying to help foreign people while we had severe economic problems of our own. Not only that,there was widespread isolationism in this country. Again,the attitude was we had a lot of problems of our own to deal with. This country’s experience in World War I helped sour many Americans on having any role in world affairs. The thing was,let other people deal with it and just leave us be.
To be fair,most people in the 1920’s or 1930’s could have even imagined someone like HItler coming to power anywhere. Even in Germany,his book,”Mein Kampf” was judged by many Germans to be “errant madness” to use the words of a much better documentary on the same time period. No one back then could have imagined that there’d be things like death camps or even a program to kill off people because of their religion or something like that. I agree that there was anti-semitism in those days.
What I disagree with is that it was widely known. While concentration camps might have been known,something like the Holocaust was a secret. There might have been some hints that leaked out,but NO ONE could have ever believed or imagined that something like this was possible and not on the scale that was revealed until the war was over. No one,not even FDR could have dreamed of something like that in their worst nightmares. They might have heard of things like Kristalnacht,but nothing so horrific as something like the Holocaust. No one at the time would have ever thought something like that was even possible. There are those here who might think me naive for saying this but I think that’s the most likely explanation of what happened back then.
And what could those “liberal Jews” have done while Six Million were murdered? As I said, the borders of occupied Europe were closed. Visas wouldn’t have done them any good, especially once they were in death camps. Yes, we brought Jewish refugees to Oswego in 1944, but those Jews were taken from liberated and neutral territory, and the Nazis weren’t going to get them anyway. We couldn’t just go into occupied Europe and bring them. Could we have rescued victims of the Nazis Euthanasia program? Could we have saved non-Jewish Europeans massacred in reprisal killings? How about all the German citizens killed in the rush to prevent them from surrendering to our troops? No, and nobody argues these points.