The TV Zone

"I'm very Jewish," says comedy legend Carl Reiner, creator of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and the sidekick interviewer of Mel Brooks' classic 1960s comedy character The 2,000 Year Old Man -- one of mainstream entertainment's first big "Jewish-sounding" characters.

"But I'm an atheist Jew," Reiner said today during PBS' press tour. "And that shocks a lot of people."

So, it seems, will "The Jewish Americans," a six-hour, three-part history debuting on PBS in January. Producer David Grubin said at the production's press conference that most people seem to think of the American Jewish experience as starting with 1880s immigration to Manhattan's Lower East Side. "Most people don't know this is a 350-year-old history," Grubin said. "Jews first came here in 1654." They were part of the nation's westward migration, the project explains, and Jews in the south "had slaves like other Southerners," Grubin said. "It's a series that shows all sides of the Jewish experience, warts and all. What you see in our film is that there are many ways of being Jewish in America."

And "America has absorbed much of what it means to be Jewish," said executive producer Jay Sanderson. Singer-actor Mandy Patinkin explains in the film that a tune as all-American as Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" is "a Yiddish song. You can hear the shtetl." (Patinkin was supposed to be at the session, but called in sick.) Reiner told critics he thought so many Yiddish/Hebrew words had crept into Americans' vocabulary -- chutzpah, for instance -- "because it has a funny sound to it. There's an onomato-poetic silliness to them."

"It's these last 50 years that have made the difference," said Grubin. After World War II, early television spread Jewish-influenced New York urban entertainment across the country, and, Reiner says in the film, Jews finally felt comfortable "making fun of their own accent" in routines like The 2,000 Year Old Man. He and Brooks had been doing that particular shtick (another Yiddish word) at New York parties for 10 years before they felt comfortable enough to commit it to a (soon-to-be bestselling) LP record. Grubin says "The Jewish Americans" is "the story of how a tiny minority made their way into the mainstream of American life."