According to David Simon, it doesn’t matter that the family at the heart of his new HBO miniseries The Plot Against America—adapted from Phillip Roth’s eponymous novel, and premiering on HBO Monday night—is Jewish. “It’s not only beside the point, but Roth himself understood that it had to be beside the point,” Simon recently told me.

Though Roth died in May of 2018, Simon did have one chance to discuss the series with him. And in that meeting, Simon said, the author “was emphatic that while these people would obviously be Jewish, they should effectively be assimilating as secular Americans.… ‘Don’t make it too Jewish,’ was actually a charge from Phillip Roth.’”

In the drama’s alternate 1940s America, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president, and his xenophobic “America First” nationalism takes hold. As a result, the Levins—a New Jersey family based on Roth’s own, which includes insurance agent Herman (Morgan Spector), his homemaker wife, Bess (Zoe Kazan), and their two sons, Sandy (Caleb Malis) and Philip (Azhy Robertson), as well as Herman’s defiant nephew Alvin (Anthony Boyle), and Bess’s spinster sister, Evelyn (Winona Ryder), who becomes involved with Lindbergh-appeaser Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro)—face increased anti-Semitism. “I can’t believe how fast it’s spread to other cities,” Herman says at one point. “And the hate is there. It’s like dry leaves waiting on a spark.”

Sure, Roth wanted to deemphasize their background—but anyone who’s Jewish will instantly recognize the Levins as landsmen. For Simon too—a self-described “less-than-observant” Jew—the story is a wider allegory about an “anti-immigrant impulse that can be easily metastasized by political demagogues” who question newcomers’ politics and loyalty.

You don’t have to be a member of the tribe to appreciate why Plot will likely have broad appeal. Simply look at a TV landscape that already includes much unapologetically Jewish fare—from Schitt’s Creek, Better Things, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Goldbergs, and Curb Your Enthusiasm to the recently concluded Transparent, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and The Spy. There haven’t been this many Jewish-themed shows on the small screen since the late 1970s and ’80s, when networks aired miniseries like Holocaust, Masada, The Winds of War, and its sequel, War and Remembrance.

Their mainstream success seems to indicate that what’s singularly Jewish can also be broadly appealing—though all this content also comes at a time when Jewish Americans face unique challenges. There’s been a huge uptick in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the U.S. over the past five years, according to the FBI; they’ve been surging in an era when only 45% of U.S adults know that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, according to a Pew Research Center survey published in January.

Entries in this newest wave of extremely Jewish shows seem to be focused even more closely on the Jewish experience, even as they mine it to tell a more universal story—as in Unorthodox, which premieres March 26. Inspired by Deborah Feldman’s memoir of the same name, the Netflix limited series follows a young Hasidic newlywed (Shira Haas) in an arranged marriage who flees her stifling life in Brooklyn’s closed religious Satmar community for Berlin, where her estranged mother lives. Though it’s told mostly in Yiddish with subtitles, cocreator Anna Winger believes the show has global appeal. “We’re living in a moment when the question of female emancipation, defining your identity outside of the expectations of your community, [is] a story many people can relate to,” she said.