'Fat People Aren't Unstable' -- For This We Needed a Study?

JEW-HATING PBS IS ABOUT TO STRIKE... AGAIN

Remember Christiane Amanpour's GOD'S WARRIORS?

On Monday's MSNBC Live with Dan Abrams, host and MSNBC General Manager Abrams attacked CNN's God's Warriors series for "a defense of Islamic fundamentalism and the worst type of moral relativism," and as "shameful advocacy masked as journalism," quipping that series host Christiane Amanpour "avoided getting bogged down in objectivity." Abrams further took exception with Amanpour for comparing those who support Israel's defense strategy to Muslim terrorists: "Christians and Jews, for
example, who support Israel's strategy for self-defense are just as much God's warriors, according to Amanpour, as the Islamic radicals who blow themselves and others up in an effort to destroy the world as we know it." SOURCE

Well, now get ready for this:

"The Jewish Americans" airs in three 2-hour segments on PBS on Wednesday, Jan. 16 and 23, 2008.

Numbers can't begin to summarize the story of "The Jewish Americans," a multilayered PBS documentary that airs in segments on three Wednesdays beginning next Wednesday. But some of them do stand out like signposts in the 350 years of social, religious, political, economic and cultural history covered in the six-hour series. The numbers affirm certain widely familiar patterns about the immigration, assimilation and identity of Jews in American life. They also point the viewer in some unexpected new
directions.

In 1654, at the start of writer/director David Grubin's timeline, a boat carrying 23 Jewish refugees landed at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. More than a century later, in 1776, 2,500 Jews lived in the American colonies, which then had a total population of 2.5 million. Seven thousand Jewish soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War and 3,000 for the Confederacy. By the 1870s, some 250,000 Jews had fanned out across the country. A half million American Jews fought in World War II.

Such figures anchor a theme that Grubin explores in various ways: The story of Jewish life in America is a steady drumbeat of assimilation and integration with the broader American narrative. Xenophobia, anti-Semitism and ongoing questions about Jewish distinctiveness have certainly occluded, complicated and enriched that forward pulse. But as University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann puts it, in one of many encomia in the series to the fusion of Jewish liberation and the American dream, "To be Jewish in America today is to be as free as a Jew has ever been in the modern world."

Getting there, of course, was hardly a straight path. Grubin unearths various surprises. Did you know, for example, that it was a Jew who conceived and marketed the 10-gallon hat? Or that "The Goldbergs," a Bronx slice-of-life radio (and later television) series that premiered in 1929, was America's first sit-com? Or that the national circulation of "The Dearborn Independent," industrialist Henry Ford's poisonously anti-Semitic newspaper, was at one time second only to that of the New York Post?

New York's Lower East Side, we learn, was the largest Jewish population center in the world in the early 20th century, with some 500,000 Jewish residents - and a desperately poor one. In the middle of that century, during the great migration to the suburbs, Jews joined the flight from American cities at a rate four times that of the general population. It was news to me, in passing, that "the Hebrew race has been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco." Or so the advertisements for the shortening said.

Grubin has done his homework and enlisted dozens of talking heads to support and help explicate his research. Structured chronologically, "The Jewish Americans" covers early immigration, population growth, the labor movement and the Yiddish theater on the first night; the second focuses on the American response to the Holocaust, while also drawing portraits of Irving Berlin, Louis Brandeis and accused Atlanta child-killer Leo Frank; and, the final episode titled "Home," surveys post-war American life, Zionism and 1960s and '70s protest movements.

Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Mandy Patinkin, Jules Feiffer, Michael Tilson Thomas and a few others offer leavening insights from the arts world. But the tone of the series is predominantly sober and serious, whether the topic is politics, labor, law, economics, architecture, home life or even the Hasidic reggae rapper Matisyahu. Actor Liev Schreiber narrates in a rich, even-tempered baritone voice. A wistful, gently wheedling clarinet dominates the musical score.

Nine rabbis get screen time. So do assorted sociologists and historians, including two, Hasia Diner and Deborah Dash Moore, who don't quite earn their extended exposure. A grave Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court, is a frequent presence. So is playwright Tony Kushner, who is wittily insightful on everything from nomenclature ("Jewish American? American Jew?") to the "conditional" existence of the immigrant to the tensions that fractured the alliance of Jews and blacks in the civil rights movement.

The show is at its best when it lets the material expand and breathe instead of being fitted into Grubin's and the commentators' sometimes facile and self-evident analyses. The section on Colonial-era Jews, enhanced by period portraits, fascinates. So does architect James Polshek's commentary on the discreet design of the early Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I.; the accounts of a dawning Jewish consciousness in both Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Henry Morgenthau Jr., Franklin Roosevelt's influential Secretary of the Treasury; and Thomas' affectionate evocation of his grandfather, the legendary Yiddish theater actor Boris Thomashefsky.

Other passages promise more than they deliver. Grubin sets up a contrived dialectic between Marcus Spiegel, the older brother of the Spiegel catalog entrepreneur, and Judah Benjamin, Confederate President Jefferson Davis' Secretary of War. The show declares the "ambivalence" of Jewish philanthropists in the early 20th century without fully exploring it. A carefully considered section on Jewish participation in the black civil rights movement gets a false coda in the story of Julius Lester, a '60s black activist who later converted to Judaism. Do we really need to be told that a group of New York City's wealthy 19th century Jews, dubbed "Our Crowd," were "very close-knit socially?"

Even when it falters, "The Jewish Americans" remains both informative and engaging. Most viewers, no matter how well acquainted they are with American Jewish history, are likely to learn things. You may already know about Hank Greenberg, the slugger for the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s, or Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America (1945). But did you also know that it was a couple of Jewish kids in Cleveland who invented "Superman?" One of their amusingly twerpy voices is heard in the show.

Sometimes it's the little throwaway observations and lines that stick. When biographer Eli Evans refers to the transition from itinerant peddling to store ownership, he labels it "the Harvard Business School of German Jews." Author Joyce Mendelson's remark that her parents never talked about life on the Lower East Side once they'd moved speaks volumes about the nature of aspiration and the drive for transformation. Patinkin's riff on Berlin's "Blue Skies" as a Yiddish melody expressed in a popular American idiom is a minor musical inspiration.

Grubin is as good on the big picture as he is on the small stuff. The account of the Holocaust and the Americans' sluggish response is unflinching. The show makes a strong case for the importance of Zionism but also accounts for the ideological divisions in contemporary views of the Israelis and Palestinians. Jewish immigration and assimilation are seen in the context of wider political and demographic changes in the country.

Viewers are bound to question some of the show's emphases and omissions. Grubin has a very strong interest in synagogues, religious practice and doctrine. Those nine rabbis aren't on camera for nothing. Borscht Belt humor gets ample attention. Major Jewish writers, by contrast, are left at the margins. Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud are never mentioned; Philip Roth, whose work from "Portnoy's Complaint" to the Zuckerman books constitute an incomparably rich and controversial canvas of 20th century American Jewish life, rates nothing more than a picture in a montage that includes Jerry Seinfeld, Barbra Streisand, Carl Sagan and Alan Greenspan.

Perhaps Grubin was merely fulfilling one of his commentator's observations about his subject. Freely clashing ideas and argument, as Kushner says, have always been a fact of Jewish American life.

SOURCE

Hat Tip to B.R.!