Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns cemented his cultural legacy with history series such as (1990) and (2019), butis the one he’s publicly deemed the most important of his career. First broadcast on PBS in September 2022, the three-part, six-hour production provides an unstinting look at 20th-century American immigration policies and attitudes, revealing how anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and isolationism worked in tandem to keep millions of persecuted Europeans out of the United States and trapped inside Hitler’s widening empire. Could we as a nation have done more to protect Europe’s Jewish population, or have even helped prevent the Holocaust? Burns doesn’t preach, nor must he. Stories shared by historians and survivors like that of the MS
