David Grubin, award-winning documentary filmmaker, and producer of the major PBS TV series, The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America, was in St. Louis last week to describe his extensive research and planning for the six-hour series, which will be aired in three, two-hour installments locally on KETC-TV, Channel 9.

Grubin spoke to over 150 members of the Jewish community, along with leaders and staff of Channel 9, the local PBS station, in the Zorensky Family Conference Center of the Jewish Federation Kopolow Building.

Jack Kalmish, president and chief executive officer of Channel 9, compared the series to those of Ken Burns on the American Civil War, Baseball and World War II, in terms of the scope of the materials to be covered.

“While the Ken Burns series on World War II focused on the impact of the war on four American communities, Channel 9 had a companion series on how St. Louisans fought in and participated in World War II.”

Kalmish indicated that there will be a similar series of local programs featuring local Jewish St. Louisans on various aspects of Jewish history and life in St. Louis. “David’s documentary has inspired us, just as that of Ken Burns inspired us. There are local Jewish stories that deserve to be told, and with the cooperation of the Jewish Federation, the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and other resources, we will present those stories to our viewers, as a companion to David Grubin’s major series.”

Kalmish described Grubin as a “producer, writer and director of documentary films, who has won numerous awards, including the George Foster Peabody Award three times, five national Emmy Awards, and an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College, among many others.”

In his introductory remarks to a presentation of major excerpts from the series The Jewish Americans, Grubin said, “I want to thank the Jewish Federation and the Holocaust Museum for their cooperation and for the very moving tour through the Holocaust Museum. We often think of the Jewish experience as one of tragedy, pogroms, expulsions and mass murders. And while in America we have had quotas and still have hate groups and anti-Semitism, for the most part the American Jewish experience has been a remarkably positive one, and this is reflected in the series.”

Calling the overall theme “a happy story,” Grubin said that “I did not dream this project up; I would not have had the chutzpah to take on a documentary series on the 350-year history of Jews in America, such a rich and complicated story. But when I was approached by WETA and JTN in California, I had the chutzpah to try it.”

Grubin said, “While we wanted to include figures like Einstein and Gershwin and Nobel Prize winners, and we did, we did not just want to create a film version of a Jewish Hall of Fame. Therefore we sought emblematic stories to highlight different aspects of the long and complicated American Jewish story.”

Stressing that he did not seek to create “an encyclopedia,” Grubin said, “what interested me was the Jewish American effort to balance between wanting to be Americans, and at the same time to hold onto their Jewish identity. For example, when I intereviewed Carl Reiner, he told me that when he and Sid Caesar did Your Show of Shows back in the 1950s, they were afraid to use Yiddish words. Later, they did The 2,000-year-old Man, which was a tremendous hit, and today, Jewish and Yiddish words like bagels and lox and chutzpah are used in common discussions, even among political figures who are not Jewish.”

Grubin said that his goal was “to explore this tension between assimilation and identity. I believe that this will resonate not just with Jewish Americans, but with all Americans among all religious and ethnic backgrounds.” Grubin added that Jews from all branches of Judaism, along with atheist and agnostic and secular Jews were included.

The excerpts from the series were shown on a large video screen, and began with the depiction of the arrival of 23 Jews from Recife, Brazil, to escape the Portuguese Inquistion, who arrived in New Amsterdam, then a Dutch colony on the island of Manhattan, in 1654.

The excerpts also included interviews with comedian and film director and writer Carl Reiner; playwright Tony Kushner, and cartoonist Jules Feifer, who discussed the phenomenon of the comic character “Superman,” created in 1933, by two Jewish teens name Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

“The secret identity of Superman, Clark Kent, fulfilled the secret wishes of lots of nerdy Jewish kids, who wanted to impress pretty girls like Lois Lane, who fell for the jocks with big muscles,” Feifer noted. The film deals extensively with Jews in comedy, popular culture and other aspects of entertainment, including music.

Irving Berlin’s remarkable career as a popular songwriter, a secular Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who wrote White Christmas, The Easter Parade and God Bless America. A film clip quotes singer Kate Smith, who popularized God Bless America as telling Berlin, “Irv, you’ve just written a new Star Spangled Banner.”

Another segment explores the remarkable career of Anna Solomon, who settled in a remote town in Arizona and became immensely successful in business, later moving to Los Angeles, where she became an influential patron of the arts and culture. “Often, in New York, there is a tendency to overlook the fact that there are interesting Jewish communities all over America, including right here in St. Louis,” Grubin said.

Other segments deal with the largescale Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe from 1880 until rigid immigration quotas were enacted in the 1920s, and the American Jewish reaction to the events of the Holocaust in Europe, down to present-day issues. One of the interviewees in the film says, about the American Jewish experience, past, present and future, “the question now is not what Judaism is, but what Judaism ought to be.”

Grubin said “I am very excited to be part of this project, and appreciate the support of Channel 9 and the St. Louis Jewish community.”

As was the case with the Ken Burns series on World War II, a large-format companion book has been released under the title, The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America, by Beth S. Wenger, who served on the board of distinguished scholars who advise on the PBS series. She holds the Katz Family Chair in American Jewish History and is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, and the dust jacket was designed by Michael Fusco, the same artwork which serves as the logo for the series. The book is published by Doubleday, and the cost for the hardcover edition is $40. It is available in local bookstores.

(The Jewish Americans will be shown on KETC-TV, Channel 9 in three, two-hour segments, at 8 p.m., on Wednesdays, Jan. 9, 16, and 23, with details about the local Jewish community companion programs to be announced. The series is a production of JTN Productions, WETA Washington, D.C. and David Grubin Productions in association with Thirteen/WNET New York. For information, call KETC’s Public Relations Office, 314-512-9036, [email protected]).