As adapted by HBO regular David Simon and Ed Burns, who previously worked together on The Wire, The Plot Against America inevitably strikes notes in its fictional, reimagined, 80-year-old world that resonate with what’s happening in the actual one right now. If that sentence sounds like something you’ve said, verbatim, at least once since 2016, that’s part of the point. “Now they have permission to crawl out from under their rocks.” “These assholes, they’ve always been here,” notes Herman’s brother, Monty (David Krumholtz), of Lindbergh’s unleashed extremist supporters. In the process, Lindbergh uncorks pent-up anti-Semitism and racism that had once been bottled.

In this alternate history of events, Charles Lindbergh - depicted here as not only a famed pilot, as he was in real life, but also a populist presidential candidate - gets elected to the nation’s highest office, boosted by his promise that U.S. In June of 1940, when the first episode of the superb The Plot Against America takes place, through 1942, when the last episode ends, America goes through a transformation that makes the members of the Levin family and other Jews across the country feel like the United States isn’t their homeland anymore at all. If you’ve read Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, or even if you’re familiar with the premise of this limited series based on that novel, you already know that this reassurance doubles as a moment of ironic foreshadowing. Still a little confused, Phillip asks his father again: “We don’t need another homeland, right?”

Prior to sitting down to Shabbat dinner with his family, Phillip watches his father give some money to a Hassidic Jewish man who knocks on the door and asks for contributions to the “Jewish homeland in Palestine.” Phillip’s cousin, Alvin, explains that the money will help Jews in Europe who are looking to settle somewhere while “running from Hitler.” That question comes from 10-year-old Phillip Levin during an early scene in episode one of HBO’s six-part The Plot Against America. John Turturro as the rabbi speaking out for Charles Lindbergh in The Plot Against America.

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