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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
The Jew S. of A.
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
PBS documentary explores the history of the Jewish community in America.
What does it mean to be Jewish in America? Peabody and Emmy Award winning filmmaker David Grubin aims to answer that question in a three-part, six hour documentary airing on PBS stations in January. Narrated by Liev Schreiber, The Jewish Americans depicts "how a tiny minority embraced the American dream and made their way into the mainstream of American life, though America hasn't always embraced them, and we trace that story over 350 years," explains Grubin. "It's a quintessentially American story with all the tensions between adaptation and identity that other minorities will find very familiar."
To prepare, "We worked with more than 250 archives, brought in 10,000 photographs and looked at about 150 hours of film, and did over 100 interviews," about 85 of which made it into the film, continues Grubin, who included both celebrities (Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Steven Spielberg, Carl Reiner, Tony Kushner, Mandy Patinkin, Matisyahu) and civilians, like a descendant of pioneer Anna Solomon.
Most people, says Grubin, "don't realize the Jews first came here in 1654 and were participating in American life, went west to Dodge City or Tombstone, and lived in the south and had slaves. The series shows all sides of the Jewish experience, warts and all."
Aiming for thematic representation more than "a Hall of Fame of great Jews," he chose to explore anti-Semitism via stories about Jewish G.I.s and lynched scapegoat Leo Frank, cover the American Dream through composer Irving Berlin, Miss America Bess Myerson, and Superman comic creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and "show the extraordinary diversity and vitality in Jewish life today" via rabbis representing all branches of Judaism. "I wanted that because it's about how Jews adapted their religion to America," notes Grubin, for whom it was also important to include the civil rights movement and the Holocaust from a Jewish-American perspective.
Overall, "The theme that kept coming up was how most Jews want to be American. They want to be a part of America, but they hold onto their Jewish identity, whatever that identity is. It could be ethnic. It could be religious. But they want to maintain that identity."
That's certainly the case with interviewee Carl Reiner, who considers himself "an atheist Jew. I'm very Jewish. We eat Jewish, we talk Jewish, we have a Passover seder. There's no religious connotation to it but there's a historic one," he says. Similarly, Grubin identifies as a secular Jew. "One thing I learned from this film is there are a lot of ways of being Jewish," he says, "and my way was making this film."
The Jewish Americans will air on Jan. 14-16 on most PBS stations nationwide and will then be immediately available on a two-disc DVD set with extras including some expanded sequences and deleted scenes.
-- Text by Gerri Miller
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
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