The U.S. and the Holocaust

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for over forty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; The Vietnam War; and Country Music.

A December 2002 poll conducted by Real Screen Magazine listed The Civil War as second only to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North as the “most influential documentary of all time,” and named Ken Burns and Robert Flaherty as the “most influential documentary makers” of all time. In March 2009, David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun said, “… Burns is not only the greatest documentarian of the day, but also the most influential filmmaker period. That includes feature filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. I say that because Burns not only turned millions of persons onto history with his films, he showed us a new way of looking at our collective past and ourselves.” The late historian Stephen Ambrose said of his films, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." And Wynton Marsalis has called Ken “a master of timing, and of knowing the sweet spot of a story, of how to ask questions to get to the basic human feeling and to draw out the true spirit of a given subject.”

Future film projects include The U.S.and the Holocaust, The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, The American Revolution, Emancipation to Exodus, and LBJ & the Great Society, among others.

Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations; and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lynn Novick, co-director and producer of The U.S. and the Holocaust, has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music for more than 30 years. She has created nearly 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Ken Burns, including Ernest Hemingway, The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War, and Prohibition — these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. One of the most respected documentary filmmakers and story tellers in America, Novick herself has received Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. duPont Columbia Awards.

College Behind Bars, Novick’s debut as solo director, premiered at the New York Film Festival and aired on PBS in 2019. Produced by Sarah Botstein, the series immerses viewers in the transformational journey of a small group of incarcerated men and women enrolled in one of the most rigorous prison education programs in America – the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).

Novick’s next project as solo director and writer is a multi-part PBS series on the history of crime and punishment in America, slated for release in 2026. Following The U.S. and the Holocaust, she is collaborating with Burns, Botstein and writer Geoffrey C. Ward on a six-hour series on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale with honors in American Studies, and lives in New York City.

Sarah Botstein has for more than two decades produced some of the most popular and acclaimed documentaries on PBS. Her work with directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, includes Hemingway (2020), College Behind Bars (2010), The Vietnam War (2017), Prohibition (2011), The War (2007) and Jazz (2001).

Botstein is co-directing and producing (with Burns and Novick) a three-part series, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Set for release in the fall of 2022, the film will be Botstein’s directorial debut. Currently, she is producing an epic six-part series on the American Revolution and a project on Lyndon Johnson’s life and presidency.

In addition to the television broadcasts, Botstein works on digital and education initiatives, in collaboration with PBS Learning Media and WETA-TV. She helps to oversee content for Ken Burns UNUM, a web-based platform and mini series which utilizes scenes from Florentine Films body of work to highlight historical themes relevant to our time.

Botstein is a graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University with a degree in American Studies.

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in New York in 1960 and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His books, apart from The Lost, include the memoirs The Elusive Embrace and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic; a translation of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy; and three collections of essays and reviews. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, he teaches literature at Bard College and lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) is editor-at-large of New York Magazine and co-host of the Pivot podcast. She’s also co-founder of Recode from Vox Media, and a regular contributor to NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. This year, she’ll launch a new podcast with Vox Media.

She was previously a contributing New York Times opinion writer and host of the podcast Sway. She also previously hosted the podcast Too Embarrassed to Ask and was producer and host of the Recode Decode podcast at Vox. Swisher co-founded Recode and, before that, co-produced and co-hosted The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference series (now called the Code Conference) with Walt Mossberg starting in 2003. It was, and still is, the country’s premier conference on tech and media, with interviewees such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Google leadership, Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey, and many other leading players. She and Mossberg were also the co-executive editors of a tech and media website, AllThingsD.com, founded in 2007. Swisher worked in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. For many years, she wrote the column “BoomTown,” which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and online at WSJ.com. Previously, Swisher covered breaking news about the web’s major players and internet policy issues, and she also wrote feature articles on technology for the paper. Earlier in her career, Swisher worked as a reporter at the Washington Post and as an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her graduate degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Swisher is also the author of aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web, published by Times Business Books in 1998. The sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future, was published in 2003 by Crown Business.

Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and Moderator of the "Reel Pieces" series at 92NY, where she has interviewed almost 300 film celebrities. She is the author of the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel). Her other books include Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski; Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director's work; Philip Kaufman, and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has. Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, currently in its fourth printing.