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Winner of the coveted Peabody Award, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews is the monumental nine-part series hosted by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Abba Eban. This epic production from public television station Thirteen/WNET New York traces the history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present, telling their story as part of the broader history of Western civilization. Five years in the making, and filmed on four continents, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews became a landmark, a television portrait of the Jewish experience with a scope and depth that is unlikely to ever be duplicated. Now, after a national public television broadcast, it will be available for the first time from Home Vision Entertainment in a dramatically expanded form including VHS, and on DVD with an interactive DVD-ROM. |
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Home Vision Entertainment will release Heritage:
Civilization and the Jews in a deluxe four-disc DVD boxed
set priced at $99.95. The set includes nine hour-long episodes on
three DVDs and the Heritage Interactive DVD-Rom. The DVDs will include
maps and excerpts from Encyclopedia Judaica, which can be explored
in more depth on the accompanying DVD-Rom. The comprehensive DVD-Rom, Heritage Interactive, is an “interactive museum of Jewish experience”, which includes over 650 annotated historical documents; 541 map views with over 2,250 explanatory essays; over 3,600 encyclopedia articles; 4,000 captions that accompany the 9 hours of original series video; over 100 interactive multimedia presentations containing over 800 historical images; an unlimited book marking system; a built-in ‘Help’ feature, and a fully searchable index of over 7000 multimedia elements. An interactive demonstration and complete series information for Heritage: Civilization and the Jews is available at the WNET/Thirteen website and at the PBS website. The DVD-Rom includes the following features: Original Series Video Heritage Interactive is organized into five interconnected components. The nine hours of the television series will form the core of this new product. Users can choose to watch the programs full-screen or in a window accompanied by tools for rapidly navigating and exploring the video. Every image will be annotated, so that, with a click of the mouse, a user can learn the name of each work of art or the location of any important site that appears on screen. Historical Documents Original documents from every period of Jewish history will be included: sacred texts, eyewitness accounts, political treaties, and literary works. Documents of a more personal nature - letters and journals - will also be included to offer glimpses of everyday life long ago. Multimedia Presentations Combining sound, video, graphics, animation, and text, these exhibits will constitute a multimedia museum of the art, artifacts, and documents of Jewish history. Selections will include biographies, brief documentaries on historical issues, and audio guided tours of past times and places. One exhibit might include readings of poetry from the golden age of Spanish Jewry. Another might narrate the life of the founder of Hadassah. Yet another might let users sample klezmer music and learn the role it played in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Linked together in intriguing ways, these presentations will add significantly to the amount of material in the original series. Historical Atlas Almost a thousand full-color maps will enable users to follow the odyssey of the Jews from their captivity in ancient Egypt to their role in shaping the modern world. Users can zoom in until the streets of Jerusalem fill the screen or pull back to gain a view of the entire earth. Specially designed to change dramatically, the maps will allow the user to move quickly through history and watch as empires come and go, and cities rise to prominence or fall into neglect. The maps are also extensively annotated so that the user need only click on a city, a trade route, or an important site, to learn of its role in the culture or politics of its time. Encyclopedia An abridged version of the Encyclopedia Judaica, the unparalleled 16-volume reference work published in 1973, will be available in electronic form. This edition, produced specially for Heritage Interactive by the editors of Encyclopedia Judaica, will include almost a third of the articles of the full Encyclopedia, abbreviated for ease of use in the computer environment. Index A powerful index will allow users to locate quickly and easily any map, article, document, or section of video. Users can take advantage of a special set of tools to create their own pathways through Heritage Interactive, browsing the material by date, region, culture, and subject of interest. A set of simple choices will allow the user to focus on a specific topic such as architecture, religion, or literature, and explore the relevant documents, maps and video. Home Vision Entertainment will also release Heritage: Civilization and the Jews in a deluxe five-tape boxed set priced at $99.95. Each tape (Volumes One through Four) includes two hour long episodes, and the ninth episode—updated to bring this compelling story up to the present—is presented on Volume Five. The tapes are available as part of the boxed set as well as individually. Volume One: A People Is Born/ The Power of the Word A People Is Born. This program profiles the life and culture of the ancient Near East – Egypt, Canaan and Mesopotamia – and recalls the Exodus from Egypt in approximately 1250 B.C.E. (Before the Common or Christian Era) as a crucial event in Israel’s self-conception and as a metaphor for all human freedom. In the experience of exile the vision of the early Israelites was transformed, and the Jewish people was born. In Jewish tradition, this emergence from Egypt has been celebrated by generation after generation in the springtime holiday of Passover, a festival of liberation as passionately observed as any nation’s independence day. The liberated exiles saw the hand of a universal God. All the world’s nations were linked in a common destiny, bound together by a moral law with inescapable consequences. The Power of the Word. The Power of the Word begins in the abundant land of Babylon, where the exiled Jew of Judah had settled after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian forces. Far from their homes in Judah, they were disoriented and confused. But they had their own vision. They came to believe more profoundly than ever before that there was a universal dimension to their faith – that their God extended to all lands, to all times. “It was here in Babylon that Jewish scribes compiled the writings they had brought from Judah – the history, the laws, the legends for the Jewish people and combined them with what had been passed down by word of mouth to form the first five books of the Bible – the Torah,” explains Mr. Eban in the program. Volume Two: The Shaping of Traditions/ The Crucible of Europe The Shaping of Traditions. In first century Rome Jews were scattered throughout the Mediterranean. Wherever they lived, communities of Jews continued to obey the laws of their own land though it might be thousands of miles away. By the year 135, the Roman armies of the Emperor Hadrian had crushed the land of Judea. A total of 580,000 Jews had been killed in battles and raids. On the ruins of Jerusalem, a Roman city was built. The shrine to Jupiter was erected where the Holy Temple had stood, and the teaching of Judaism became a capital crime. Emperor Hadrian obliterated the Jewish state and renamed Judea, Palestine. The Shaping of Traditions chronicles the decline of this Roman Empire, a process extending over four centuries, and shows how the Jewish faith continued to survive throughout these turbulent years. The Crucible of Europe. The world of Islam, stretching from India in the East to the Iberian Peninsula in the West, is where the majority of Jews lived. Here, in Islamic Spain, the Jews found a “Golden Age” in the 10th and 11th centuries. An invasion of the Berber tribes from North Africa brought an end to this era of enlightenment. In Northern Europe, the Latin Church was gradually consolidating its authority. For Jews, life in this Christian world was attractive but often difficult, for the bitterness of religious differences between Jews and Christians had become institutionalized. The Jewish people found themselves trapped in a politically and economically untenable position. Volume Three: The Search for Deliverance/ Roads from the Ghetto The Search for Deliverance. This program picks up the thread of Jewish history as the intellectual awakening of the Renaissance began to alter the attitudes and habits of all people. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johanes Kepler, Galileo and other scholars began to examine the world around them with new eyes. Within the confines of the Venetian ghetto, Jewish culture flourished. Jewish composers, artists and poets achieved fame that transcended the ghetto walls. Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had escaped the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition, flocked to Amsterdam, known as the “New Jerusalem” where refugees from religious intolerance were welcomed. Roads from the Ghetto. The 19th century witnessed the rise of nationalism, romanticism, industrialism and socialism across the European continent. Jews were offered political equality and citizenship and new career opportunities in the nations of Europe. Roads from the Ghetto also documents the infamous Dreyfus case in France, which served as a springboard for “anti-Semitism”; the birth of Zionism and other modern expressions of Judaism; and the waves of Jewish emigration from Europe toward the end of the 19th century. Volume Four: The Golden Land/ Out of the Ashes The Golden Land. The Golden Land describes one of the most important and exciting chapters in Jewish history – the relationship between the United States and the Jewish people. Never before in their 3,000-year history, had Jews made such a significant contribution to the shaping and growth of a country. The program examines the role of American Jews from the days of George Washington. With the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, a new chapter in the American Jewish story was written. Some two million Jews from all over Eastern Europe converged on the United States from 1880 to 1920. The program captures in archival photos and rare documentary footage, the voluntary “ghettos” in which they settled – cramped, dirty and unlit sections, the best known of which is New York’s Lower East Side. Out of the Ashes. “Out of the ashes comes the understanding that no one’s life can be guaranteed without constant struggle. Belief in the ultimate ability of humankind to overcome the darkest, most brutal of forces is the light which must carry us forward,” declares Ambassador Eban in this haunting hour. Out of the Ashes attempts to treat the Holocaust not only as a devastating memory of yesterday, but as a profound challenge for today. The program concludes with the words of author Eli Weisel, noted author and Holocaust survivor: “We have all the reasons in the world to despair and to give up on man and to give up on culture, on civilization, on language and even on God. But we won’t permit it to happen. We have the reasons to do so, but we will not invoke them and, in spite of everything, we shall go on believing.” Volume Five: Into the Future Into the Future. Although the Nazis had been defeated, the persecution of Jews continued in Eastern Europe after World War II. Although many of the survivors found a haven in the United States, there were still many borders closed to Jewish refugees. Their hope rested in the Middle East, in Palestine, part of the disintegrating British Empire. The program examines Israel’s relationship to American Jews and modern Jewish communities elsewhere in the world. It reviews the distribution and the state of Jews and addresses the long-range issues which confront them: the lingering anti-Semitism in many countries; the crisis of Jewish identity in the United States and Israel; the crisis of Palestinian relations in Israel; and the larger question of the role of the Jewish people in today’s rapidly evolving world. Series host, Abba Eban, said of the Heritage Civilization and the Jews project, "It is a matter of profound importance that audiences in the U.S. and around the world, both Jews and non-Jews, can now experience through television and new technologies the long, continuous, somber, sometimes tragic, yet noble story of the Jewish journey across the theater of history. The series and the new DVD-ROM examine, through art and sculpture, writing and film, the miracle and mystery of Jewish history--self preservation, resonance, suffering and renewal--and its impact on the spiritual and intellectual history of mankind." "I want to express my gratitude to Thirteen/WNET New York for its creativity and steadfast commitment to this idea for more than 20 years; to the many funders who have energized its transformation into new technological forms; to PBS stations for rebroadcasting the updated series and to PBS.org, where teachers, families, and the public can find diverse thematic pathways through the material; and to Amazon.com for making books and media of Jewish interest, including Heritage, available to the public in one place. That the series is being offered in an unprecedented variety of formats is a service to people of all faiths who wish to explore the history, culture and contribution of the Jewish people to world civilization." |
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