Jewish American Heritage Month
This May, EDSITEment celebrates Jewish American heritage month by pointing to the rich array of educational resources on this subject that the National Endowment for the Humanities has funded over the past decades. Many of the programs listed below are films which appeared on PBS as stand alone specials or part of long-running series such as American Experience and American Masters. Each of them is accompanied by a multimedia website or webpage, which extends the life of the program with video clips, images, and interactives that can be used by teachers in their classroom or students doing research.
This year’s celebration is inspired by an exhibit at the Library of Congress entitled From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life. The idea of America as both a haven and a home for the cultures and civilizations of the myriad diverse groups who, over the centuries, have immigrated to the United States is one that deeply resonates with most Americans. The twin blessings of freedom and opportunity that these immigrants found in America encouraged and rewarded active participation in the social, political, and cultural life of the nation with results which we can celebrate in this feature.
A good place to begin if one wants to understand Jewish life in America would be The Jewish Americans, recently broadcast on PBS stations and partially funded by NEH, offers a treasure trove of video clips, images, and student interactives on such topics as the Diaspora, which sent millions of Jews to the United States, the challenges of assimilation, the rise of immigrants from street peddlers on the lower East Side of New York city to sophisticated and wealthy merchants in the fashion industry, and the critical role that philanthropic organizations and education plays in the Jewish American community. The witty essayist Joseph Epstein wrote about this program in his article “Hebrew National” for Humanities magazine.
A related NEH-funded website Jews in America: Our Story documents the growth of the Jewish community from a group of 23 refugees fleeing from the Portuguese Inquisition in 1654. This comprehensive web site on the history and culture includes an interactive historical timeline, with a gallery of over 500 artifacts drawn from the library, archival, and museum collections of the Center for Jewish History and its partners.
PBS American Masters offers rich resources for investigating the exemplary contributions of Jewish Americans to such fields as music, theatre, film, and television. Where would American music be without the dynamic rhythms of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland or the swinging melodies of Benny Goodman and his orchestra? American Theatre would be poorer without the complex characters and conflicts of Arthur Miller’s plays, the dazzling directing talent of Jerome Robbins and Harold Clurman and the brilliant actors developed under the mentorship of Stella Adler. Similarly, listen to how Allen Ginsberg’s life and poems “Howl” and “Kaddish” inspired the counterculture of America in the mid point of the century or how Annie Leibovitz is still turning celebrity photography into an art. It may come as something of a surprise to discover that American Masters also produced a program on one of the greatest scientific thinkers of all time Albert Einstein. Yet he surely deserves recognition in a series devoted to “examining the lives, works, and creative processes of our most outstanding cultural artists.”
Over the years, NEH has supported the production of many episodes of the long-running series American Experience. Whether the programs are devoted to relatively well-known figures such as Emma Goldman, the passionate radical, or touch on the historic actions of a long forgotten New York lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, who defended the Scottsboro boys, the American Experience website offers new and often surprising insights into the diverse roles that Jewish Americans played in the larger national story.
NEH’s long partnership with Ken Burns has led to the production of award-winning series, including Baseball, in which the roles of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, two Jewish Americans who excelled at the national pastime, are featured. Further resources on these and other sports legends can be found on the already mentioned websites Jews in America: Our Story and The Jewish Americans.
Finally, for a more comprehensive investigation of the way the Jewish people have interacted with Western culture, see Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, a vintage PBS program partially funded by the NEH that traces Jewish history from its origins to the present day.
PBS American Epxerience
NEH Supported PBS American Masters
Other PBS Programs Funded by NEH
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