If you caught Simon Schama on "The Colbert Report" recently, plugging his five-part PBS series "The Story of the Jews," you'd be forgiven for thinking he's a comic with a passing interest in history.

In fact, the British historian and professor of art history at Columbia University has more than a dozen documentaries to his credit. His enthusiasm for his subjects is contagious.

Schama's previous documentaries, especially "A History of Britain" and "The Power of Art," proved his eloquence and charm as a teacher. His new series is the most personal of his many works.

There he is, wearing a yarmulke inside a synagogue, recalling his boyhood Hebrew lessons, or in Lithuania, talking about his ancestors hauling wood in the forests. Vintage film clips, some lovely, some horrific, supplement his walk through historic landscapes. From the shtetl to the streets of New York's lower East Side, he pictures the sons of immigrants inventing Tin Pan Alley and he shares a deep cultural wound on the subject of anti-Semitism.

His 15-part, Emmy-winning "A History of Britain" was comprehensive, but this five-parter is moving.

"The Story of the Jews" airs over two nights, March 25 and April 1; the first two hours premiere 7-9 p.m. Tuesday on Rocky Mountain PBS.


Schama gives an often poetic and passionate tour of Jewish history and identity, religious and cultural. The idea of the Jews as an ongoing story is the central theme. The sense of the story being continually written is given graphic illustration, as the Hebrew letters come alive in the opening credits, the people and the story becoming one.

The Jews' loyalty to the "God of Words," no matter what slavery, persecution or exile threw at them, gives Schama cause to celebrate.

Original research supports his point, and he delicately handles primary sources including fifth-century BC manuscripts from ancient Egypt, a trove of documents recording medieval Jewish life in the Mediterranean and the Near East, records from the mounting conflicts between Christians and Jews in Spain and more.

New archaeological findings, old musical traditions, nods to Sigmund Freud, Felix Mendelssohn, as well as his own family's seder table — Schama pulls it all together in a stunning, artful essay.

The visuals are often overshadowed by Schama's powerful evocative speech — part lecture, part personal revelation. There's less emphasis on Jews around the globe than on the Eastern European experience, and the modernizing efforts of the Reform movement get short shrift (Reconstructionist Jews aren't mentioned).

And then, as always when Jews gather, things get complicated. What's the old saying? "Two Jews, three opinions." Especially on the subject of Israel.

In the series' fifth hour — after an excursion to recall the Jews who ran early Hollywood — he documents how the Holocaust and the creation of Israel have "fundamentally changed what it means to be Jewish."

Who wouldn't agree when he wishes the story could end with the 1940 Oscars, when Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen's Jewishly infused "Over the Rainbow" was named song of the year? But we know what came shortly after.

"It's not just what the Nazis did to the Jews, but what everyone else failed to do that made the moral case for Israel," he says.

Schama calls himself an unapologetic Zionist. To give a sense of the modern conflict, he interviews a West Bank settler as well as a Palestinian villager, and he looks at the day-to-day reality of occupation and dispossession. His thoughts regarding the Jews' "territorial entitlement" will be controversial. But as he stands in the shadow of the ugly wall separating Israelis and Palestinians, he's sure this isn't the end of the story, either.
