Simon Schama explores the extraordinary story of the Jewish experience from past to present

SIMON SCHAMA LOOKS AT THE IMPACT OF THE JEWS AND THOSE MOMENTS WHEN THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE HAS CHANGED THE FATE OF THE WORLD. Travelling the globe from New York to Odessa, Berlin to Jerusalem, Schama tells ancient and modern stories that illuminate the passions and perplexities of the Jewish people today. Using the most recent revelations of archaeology, the series engages with Jewish art and architecture: from the spectacular synagogue mosaics of the Galilean city of Sepphoris, to ornate Torah scrolls from Persia; the glories of the illuminated books of the middle ages to the fierceness of Jewish modernists like Schoenberg and the populism of Jewish entertainers like Irving Berlin. Each episode speaks to then and now. The first episode traces how the Jewish adoption of a supreme invisible deity changed the world by taking the form of a portable book, and the drive of scholars, adventurers and archaeologists to prove and sometimes to disprove the historical reality of the Bible story. The second episode looks at the experience of Jews in Christian and Muslim worlds through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, while the third episode looks at the explosion of creativity that drove Jews out of the ghetto to help create modern culture. The fourth episode looks at two of the major directions Jews took in that modern world some following their passion for social justice, others embracing the dynamism of immigrant America to create the department store, the movies, and the great American songbook. The final episode explores how the horror of mass destruction affected or failed to affect the rest of the world, and how, with the creation of Israel, the Jewish story remains the fulcrum on which the fate of the world turns.