Community Activism for Entertaining Evils: Dramatizing Slavery and the Holocaust in 1970s American Television

• In Event: Media, Television and Publishing as Sources of American Jewish History

Abstract

My paper explores the entangled histories behind the production and reception of two blockbuster 1970s television miniseries HOLOCAUST (NBC, 1978) and ROOTS (ABC, 1977), which depicted the histories of the Shoah and American slavery respectively in transformative ways. As two of the most popular television series in American history – each with over 120 million viewers – with remarkably similar structures and effects on promoting historical study of slavery and the HOLOCAUST respectively, scholars have previously suggested that ROOTS may have informed the making of HOLOCAUST. My research is the first to explore at length the causal relationship between the two; and I demonstrate how ROOTS’ innovative representation of historical evil influenced HOLOCAUST, in its production, promotion by the American Jewish community, and critical reception. Drawing on oral histories with producers and actors, archival sources from ethnic advocacy organizations and production companies, and contemporary news coverage, I show how organizations like the American Jewish Committee purposefully sought to emulate the popular response ROOTS evoked in the American public by creating educational and commemorative media for HOLOCAUST. And as popular and critical coverage of the two miniseries shows, American popular understandings and discourse around filmic images of slavery consistently invoked the Holocaust and vice versa.
Studying similar media from the same era can yield important lessons about the meaning of historical memory in various communities. For instance, the two historical miniseries were used as springboards for contemporary public discussion of political issues that ranged from Watergate and Vietnam to Soviet repression and abortion policy. Yet while both ROOTS and HOLOCAUST received criticism for artistic failings, critics subjected HOLOCAUST to significantly more criticism for historical trivialization and commercial sponsorship. I argue this demonstrates that Holocaust history has occupied a place of sacredness in American culture and memory that slavery does not.

Author

• Jonathan Marrow, Oxford University