You know what you are getting with a Ken Burns documentary, and The US and the Holocaust (BBC Four) is cut from the film-maker’s familiar cloth. (I say “Ken Burns” as a sort of cultural shorthand – this is co-directed by Burns and his longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein.) These films are long, detailed patchworks of archive photographs and historical footage, cut with interviews with historians and people who were there, all held together by the authoritative voice of Burns’ regular narrator Peter Coyote. The three-part series explores the US response to the Nazi persecution of Jews, but,...