The chronically insubordinate Alvin takes a more militant approach. An armchair leftist who follows the war in Europe via newsreels and listens to Walter Winchell on the radio, he sees right through Lindbergh and the “fascist bastards” who back him. Herman turns down a promotion that might’ve bought the family a house after they’re harassed in what would’ve been their new hometown by German-Americans at a beer garden. Though the Levins’ largely Jewish neighborhood remains a safe haven, anti-Semitism festers nearby. He calls out Jews as war agitators-and as a bonafide American hero, he gets away with it.
When we meet the Levins, in the summer of 1940, Lindbergh is launching his last-minute campaign on an isolationist platform that is nominally anti-war but transparently sympathetic to the Third Reich. And it’s their passionate debates, more than any sensational turn of events, that give the slow, deliberate show its resonance. Though they share blood, culture and heritage, each character reacts in a different way to Lindbergh’s ascent. Occupying two floors of a shared house, insurance agent Herman ( Homeland’s Morgan Spector) and his wife Bess ( Zoe Kazan) preside over a clan that includes their two sons, artistic teen Sandy (Caleb Malis) and sensitive 10-year-old Philip (Azhy Robertson from Marriage Story) Herman’s orphaned, angry-young-man nephew Alvin (Anthony Boyle) and Evelyn, Bess’ older sister, whose life has been stymied by an obligation to care for their sick mother. At the center of this saga from The Wire and The Deuce creator David Simon and his frequent collaborator Ed Burns are the Levins, a working-class Jewish family in Newark, NJ. It makes sense, then, that argument is the primary mode of conversation in The Plot Against America, debuting March 16, an incisive six-episode series adapted from the 2004 Philip Roth novel that imagines an alternate history in which legendary aviator and America First mouthpiece Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 election.
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