In first trailer, ‘The Plot Against America’ looks to rewrite the book
John Turturro as Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf in “The Plot Against America.” Visible is an eagle design on the America First banners that resembles the one on the backs of one dollar bills. Image by Courtesy of HBO, Photo by Michael K. Short
By PJ Grisar January 30, 2020
The story goes that Philip Roth was reading the autobiography of historian Arthur Schlesinger, when he stopped short.
”I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940,” Roth recalled in 2004. “That’s all there was, that one sentence with its reference to Lindbergh and to a fact about him I’d not known. It made me think, ‘What if they had?’”
That query launched a four-year project in speculative fiction: Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America,” which imagines the presidency of the renowned aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who once accepted a medal from the Nazis and gave an ignominious speech about the “Jewish race” pushing America toward war with Germany.
In the first trailer for David Simon’s forthcoming television treatment of the novel, Lindbergh can be heard making that same speech.“He’s calling us war agitators,” says the character of beleaguered insurance salesman Herman Levin (Morgan Spector), as he listens in on the radio.
While the novel mostly tracks the childhood memories of the adult Philip Roth — the actual author in a fictionalized timeline — the show seems poised to follow the perspective of Roth’s parents, Herman and Bess (Zoe Kazan), and his older brother Sandy (Calib Malis), who are all given the surname “Levin” in the series. Scenes of Herman wiping swastika graffiti off Jewish tombstones and crossing paths with a cloaked Klansman hint that the family will weather extreme bigotry, while in the book they suffer strain through anti-Semitic government programs, but dodge the worst effects of a series of nationwide pogroms.
Central to the family’s upended lives are Philip’s vapid aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder) and her husband, the South Carolina-born rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), who heads a department in the Lindbergh administration aimed at assimilating Jewish youth and families through relocation. A tense conversation between Herman and Bengelsdorf plays throughout the trailer, alongside shots of increasing violence. Because Roth’s novel plays out mostly through insidious — and ostensibly wholesome — anti-Semitic policies, it’s likely the show, by no less accomplished a master of social drama as Simon, is a lot more subtle than the trailer lets on. We’ll have to wait until March 16 to find out for sure.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected]
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
