181. The U.S. and the Holocaust with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of the Sharon Says So Podcast, we are thrilled to sit down with documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. Their new docuseries, The U.S. and the Holocaust, airs on PBS on Friday, September 18th, 2022 and highlights the nuances of America’s response to the Holucaust. Ken and Sarah talk about their work, and about how it can often be the little known, everyday people–citizens and desk-sitting bureaucrats–who can make a lasting impact on history. Heroism does not mean absolute perfection, and many historical leaders struggled with making decisions, sometimes wrongly or too late. But as Americans, we are often at our best when we commit to considering and acting on behalf of our fellow human neighbors.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, welcome. Delighted to have you here today and I could not be more thrilled
0:06.5	to be sharing a conversation with the legendary filmmaker Ken Burns and his collaborator
0:12.6	Sarah Botsdine. We are talking today about a new film that they have made called The
0:18.3	US and the Holocaust. And this conversation could not be more pertinent to America today.
0:27.8	So let's dive in because here's where it gets interesting.
0:31.7	I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon SSO podcast.
0:40.0	I am extremely delighted to be joined today by Ken Burns and Sarah Botsdine who have
0:47.4	created and collaborated on such an important film about America and the Holocaust. Thank
0:55.0	you both for joining me. Thank you for having us. If people are not already familiar with
1:01.6	your prolific bodies of work, I would love to have you just give us a very brief overview
1:08.2	of who you are and what you do and I'll start with you again.
1:11.3	Yeah, so my name is Ken Burns. I have been making historical documentaries about the United
1:16.0	States for almost 50 years. I have been interested in not just the kind of dry facts and dates
1:22.9	of the past, but also a kind of emotional archaeology that brings it together and also
1:27.6	speaking directly to this idea of Unum, the Latin motto of the United States is E. Pluribus
1:33.8	Unum out of many one. Sometimes there's too much Pluribus and not enough Unum and I think
1:38.9	the works have been an attempt to be about that and they've been about the US, but they've
1:43.8	also been about us, all the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all
1:50.2	of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the US.
1:56.2	That's the beat that I've worked in for nearly half a century.
2:00.3	How about you, Sarah?
2:02.3	Well, Sarah Bobstein and I have been lucky enough to work for Ken for the last 26 years
	...

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