Review: Ken Burns issues a chilling warning with ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’

“The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the latest big PBS documentary from Ken Burns, is a different sort of film for him in that — unlike “Baseball” or “Jazz” or “Benjamin Franklin” — it seems very much a response to current events, made not just as a commemoration but as a warning. American nativism, xenophobia and white supremacy, having been given cover by the previous president, are renascent; the Anti-Defamation League found a 61% increase in attacks on Jewish institutions from 2020 to 2021.

Burns (with co-directors Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) will make that point explicit at the close of six emotionally demanding hours — spread across three episodes, airing Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday — but it is always there, not far from the surface, in this thorough history of the American response, and lack of it, to Germany’s criminal war on the Jews. Still circulating