Step into an Alternate Reality, HBO’s “The Plot Against America” Starts Sunday, March 1 [VIDEO]

From creators David Simon and Ed Burns comes The Plot Against America, an alternate American history story of the country’s turn to fascism told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey. Starring Zoe Kazan, Morgan Spector, Winona Ryder, and John Turturro, the limited series premieres on March 16th at 9PM.

The story follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee, and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated.

Although criticized from the left, and hated by most Jewish Americans, Lindbergh musters a strong tide of popular support from the South and the Midwest and is endorsed by Conservative Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark. Lindbergh wins the election over incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide under the slogan “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war.” Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler is Lindbergh’s vice president, and Lindbergh nominates Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior. With Lindbergh now in the White House, the Roth family begins increasingly to feel like outsiders in U.S. society.

Lindbergh’s first act is to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, promising that the United States will not interfere with German expansion in Europe (known as the “Iceland Understanding,” after the place where it is signed), and with Imperial Japan, promising noninterference with Japanese expansion in Asia (known as the “Hawaii Understanding”). The new presidency begins to take a toll on Philip’s family. Philip’s cousin Alvin joins the Canadian Army to fight in Europe. He loses his leg in combat and comes home with his ideals destroyed. He leaves the family and becomes a racketeer in Philadelphia. A new government program, the Office of American Absorption (OAA), begins to take Jewish boys to spend a period of time living with exchange families in the South and Midwest to “Americanize” them. Philip’s older brother Sandy is one of the boys selected, and after spending time on a farm in Kentucky under the OAA’s “Just Folks” scheme, he comes home showing contempt for his family, calling them “ghetto Jews.”