Word: holocaust
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...ratings after the four-night documentary fiction were impressive. NBC estimated that at one point or another, some 120 million Americans tuned in Holocaust. It scored 14 points lower than the alltime ratings winner, last year's Roots series, but still ranked second in the category of "entertainment." Author Gerald Green's novel, based on his script, is now in its tenth printing and has sold more than 1 million copies...
...Holocaust came at a moment of unusual stirring of old memories, fears and other passions among American Jews. It played last week just before Passover, timed to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Skokie, Ill., 7,000 who survived Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka awaited the promised march by American Nazis clothed in brown shirts and the First Amendment. Some Christian churches around the U.S. distributed yellow Stars of David for members to wear on their breasts; the gesture, sweet enough perhaps, smacked of moral self-congratulation. Displays like that are impressive only when they...
...evil past and a skittish future gusted around together. Israeli Premier Menachem Begin was due in the U.S. to raise money. What he needed more than that was moral capital to replace what his government has lost in recent months among American Jews and gentiles alike. Television's Holocaust may have done something to restore that fund of good will toward Israel. The past, Israel's raison d'être and validation, the pedigree of its suffering, came crowding back in the series' deadly lists: Kristallnacht, Eichmann, Himmler, Babi Yar, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-or, rather, television...
...presentation of Holocaust there was a lot of banality quite different from the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt described in her controversial 1963 book on Adolf Eichmann. The commercials, for example, were ridiculous and outrageous intrusions. Viewers drawn back into the most painful darknesses of the century would suddenly, repeatedly, find themselves jolted into clusters of ads that seemed almost deliberately designed to offend: the viewer's mind was forced to make the transit from Auschwitz to Bottoms Up pantyhose-one for those women who want the fanny rounded, the other for those who want it smooth...
...Holocaust never supplies enough surrounding political and economic context for its drama. The adolescent born in 1965, trying to comprehend what happened so long ago, cannot in the 9½ hours find Germany's post-World War I humiliation, its horrific inflation under Weimar, the strange, grasping hopes that so many Germans invested in Hitler. He or she will not understand why the German people allowed it all to happen, a mystery connected to the question of why the Jews did not comprehend everything earlier...