| Summary: | Simon Schama presents The Story of the Jews, a five-part look at 3000 years of Jewish history and the impact the Jews have made on the world. The five-hour series follows Schama – who has written and presented 50 documentaries on art, literature and history and is a Contributing Editor of the Financial Times, as he travels from Russia and the Ukraine to Egypt, Israel and Spain, exploring the imprint that Jewish culture has made on the world and the drama of suffering, resilience and rebirth that has gone with it. The series is at the same time, a personal journey for Schama who has been immersed in Jewish history since his postwar childhood; a meditation on its dramatic trajectory, and a macro- history of a people whose mark on the world has been out of all proportion to its modest numbers.“If you were to remove from our collective history” said Schama, “the contribution Jews have made to human culture, our world would be almost unrecognizable. There would be no monotheism, no written Bible, and our sense of modernity would be completely different. So the history of the Jews is everyone’s history too and what I hope people will take away from the series is that sense of connection: a weave of cultural strands over the millennia, some brilliant, some dark, but resolving into a fabric of thrilling, sometimes tragic, often exalted creativity.
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