British - Historian | February 13, 1945 -
America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.
Simon Schama
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Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
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Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as storytelling, you remember it in food, and you remember it in the family.
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I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me.
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The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.
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As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
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The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
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I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury.
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I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.
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From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
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Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.
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Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are.
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