Bob Schwartz

In 2022 Ken Burns released the PBS documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust:

The U.S. and the Holocaust explores America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century. It dispels competing myths that Americans either were ignorant of the unspeakable persecution that Jews and other targeted minorities faced in Europe or that they looked on with callous indifference. The film tackles a range of questions that remain essential to our society today, including how racism influences policies related to immigration and refugees as well as how governments and people respond to the rise of authoritarian states that manipulate history and facts to consolidate power.

We consider it here and now because this is the week set aside to remember the Holocaust. It is the week that Biden remembers to talk about the Holocaust and about the antisemitism that drove it. He did not talk about Gaza.

What is missing, and what The U.S. and the Holocaust documents, is the inconvenient truth that America was ambivalent and late responding to the horror. Powerful politicians didn’t want to address it, because they didn’t like Jews, blacks, and anyone who wasn’t a white, right-thinking American. Journalists who tried to chronicle Germany’s program of hate were thrown out of that country.

There is a confusing conflation about Gaza. When those who were and are the victims of hate, then and now, respond to yet another massacre of hate on October 7, isn’t that hate—that antisemitism—the central and overriding issue, in Palestine and America? Doesn’t it push any other related horror to the margin and justify it?

That’s why The U.S. and the Holocaust is so important. For various reasons, we didn’t do more sooner, but we could have. For various reasons today in Gaza, we could do more, but we haven’t. Are those failures, then and now, missed opportunities for better and more humane outcomes? Or are those failures complicity?