New Class: “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews” – One Generation Later

Three-part Zoom seminar on landmark series by Abba Eban, led by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, beginning on November 12 at 7 PM EST. Sign up now! Space is limited.

At a time when Jews are questioning the value of their heritage, and some even hiding their identity¹, we look back at a project from 40 years ago that made American Jews swell with pride.

Back in 1984, Abba Eban’s PBS series, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, made an enormous splash, was viewed by 50 million people and won a Peabody Award and two Emmys. This nine-part series tells the Jewish story from ancient times in Mesopotamia, through Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages, through the Holocaust to present-day America and Israel.

In three Zoom sessions, I’ll take a fresh look at Eban’s work - and Jewish history itself - and discuss how his optimistic vision holds up 40 years later, at a time where world Jewry is in a very different (and some would say more perilous) place. At the same time, we’ll follow the series in exploring the threads that define the Jewish experience, including 3000 years of its interaction with other civilizations.

The first session (Nov. 12 at 7 E.S.T.) will cover the first three episodes of the series - the biblical and rabbinic periods. The second (Nov. 19) will span the Middle Ages to the dawn of modernity and the third (Dec. 3) will focus on the past few centuries, including America, the Holocaust and Israel, adding our own updated speculations on how Judaism has changed since October 7, 2023.

The nine “Heritage” videos are available for free online - and for your convenience, you can find them right here, on this page. Watching at least the first video in advance of the first session on Nov. 12 at 7:00 PM eastern is recommended but not required. ²

The sessions are free but RSVP is required in order to receive the Zoom link, which will be sent out as the first class draws near. SPACE IS LIMITED. SIGN UP NOW!

The “Heritage” videos are below. They can also be found on YouTube.

See below the videos the original review of the series in The NY Times:³

1. See Washington Post, Oct 16, 2025 also on MSN

U.S. Jews increasingly say they are hiding their identity in a country where they believe they continue to face significant antisemitism and where slightly fewer than 1 in 5 feel very safe, a Washington Post poll finds.

The nation’s 6 million Jewish adults also are skeptical of President Donald Trump’s campaign to fight antisemitism on college campuses, with nearly two-thirds suggesting he is conducting it for other reasons, according to the poll. Jews widely disapprove of Trump’s performance overall, the results show.

The poll was conducted in early September, before Trump helped negotiate a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian detainees.

Nearly half of U.S. Jews say there is “a lot” of antisemitism in the U.S., and a similar share say there is “some” — numbers almost identical to the results of a Pew Research Center survey conducted five years ago.

A third say they don’t feel safe in the United States, and two-thirds report seeing antisemitic content online at least once a month. At the same time, a large majority — 73 percent — say they have not been the target of antisemitic remarks online or in person in the past year.

In one clear development, the poll finds 42 percent of Jewish Americans say they’ve avoided publicly wearing, carrying or displaying anything that might help people identify them as Jewish in the past year. That is up from 26 percent who said that to a similar question in a 2023 poll by the American Jewish Committee and from 23 percent in 2022 but similar to 40 percent tracked by the group last year.

Joan Rubin, 55, who works at a housing development in the Bronx, said she recently stopped wearing a six-pointed Star of David after someone in her neighborhood approached her about the necklace.

“They said: ‘Oh, you like the idea of killing babies?’ I said ‘No, of course not.’ Then they said: ‘Then you better take that f---ing thing off your neck, or maybe you need to not walk around this neighborhood,’” Rubin recalled.

Just 18 percent of Jews say they feel “very” safe in the U.S., while 51 percent say they feel somewhat safe, 26 percent say “not too” safe and 6 percent say “not at all.”

There have been several high-profile threats and attacks on Jews and Jewish organizations in recent months. In April, an attacker set fire to the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), who is Jewish, during the Passover holiday; a Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to the charges Tuesday. In late May, a gunman shot and killed two Israeli Embassy employees as they left a reception at a Jewish museum in D.C. Less than two weeks later, a man in Boulder, Colorado, was accused of hurling molotov cocktails at a demonstration where people had gathered to call for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Those attacks are increasingly motivated by Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza, the Anti-Defamation League concluded in June. In 2024, 58 percent of antisemitic incidents “contained elements related to Israel or Zionism,” according to the organization’s annual antisemitism report, released this year. That has risen since the group began tracking the data with a new definition two years ago.

During the months after the war began in 2023, Jewish students and watchdog groups saw a series of antisemitic incidents on campuses. Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York sheltered in a library as pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on the glass walls of the building. At a pro-Palestinian protest near Tulane University in New Orleans, at least two students were assaulted in a melee that began when someone tried to burn an Israeli flag.

In the 2024-2025 school year, as the war continued, vandalism and assaults on campuses were down sharply, but online antisemitic bullying was up, according to Hillel International, a Jewish student organization.

The Post poll finds Jewish women are more likely than men to say they avoided displaying Jewish symbols (51 percent vs. 36 percent). Younger Jews also are more likely to say that: 53 percent among those under age 35, compared with 45 percent of those ages 35-49, 40 percent among those ages 50-64 and 34 percent of those age 65 and older.

The administration has cited fighting anti-Jewish harassment as the motivation for everything from deporting pro-Palestinian international students to cutting billions in science and medical research grants from colleges it says have tolerated bias against Jews.

But 69 percent say a task force created by Trump won’t be effective at reducing antisemitism on college campuses, and 71 percent of U.S. Jews disapprove generally of the way Trump is handling his job.

Asked in the poll how effective the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, based at the Department of Justice, would be at reducing antisemitism on college campuses, 27 percent said “not too” effective and 42 percent said “not at all.”

2. The Heritage companion book is available on Amazon. And for a more contemporary contrast, I suggest two current books that will come up in the class: Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (2024), by Joshua Leifer, and Sarah Hur­witz’s new book, As a Jew: Reclaim­ing Our Sto­ry From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us.

3. Here’s the New York Times review of the series, from Sept. 30, 1984

PUBLIC TV PRESENTS A 9-HOUR HISTORY OF THE JEWS

By James Feron

JERUSALEM

It was several years ago and Abba Eban had just signed on as host and narrator for an ambitious series that WNET/Channel 13 would produce, ‘’Heritage: Civilization and the Jews.’‘ But the Israeli diplomat, who has a keen eye for political problems, saw trouble looming with the filming of the Ten Commandments. Israel was about to sign a peace treaty with the Egyptians.

‘’Although it was a bit premature,’‘ Mr. Eban said recently, ‘’I thought that since we were going to give the Sinai back, let’s rush in and do the Ten Commandments before we have to depend on Egyptian bureaucracy.’‘ And so it came to pass that an expedition was organized and they climbed the 7,000-foot-high Mount Sinai, by jeep and by foot, and finished just in time.

Mr. Eban leaned back in a large chair in the office of his Herzliya home and shuddered lightly at the recollection. ‘’It’s very high up and we knocked ourselves out. I got a little fainty - change of temperature, I think.’‘ He smiled. ‘’How Moses at the age of 120 shlepped himself up there, I don’t know.’‘

Moses did it twice, a task that Mr. Eban did not face, although he thought he might. ‘’We went to 15 countries eventually, some of them more than once,’‘ he said. ‘’There’s a lot of film you take that has to be taken again. So, I had a talk with Sadat in case we had to go back.’‘

And, in common with Mr. Eban, the producers, historical experts and probably a portion of the television audience, the late Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt, had his own special interpretation of a portion of Jewish history. ‘’He said, ‘You can come back here as long as you make it clear that Jewish history begins in Egypt and not in Babylonia. All that stuff about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - this is just legend, not history. History begins with Moses,’ which incidentally is true,’‘ added Mr. Eban.

The nine-part series of 60-minute segments, which begins tomorrow night at 9 on more than 270 public-television stations including Channel 13, traces the Jewish role in 5,000 years of history. ‘’The idea was, first of all, to tell you what the civilization was, and then how the Jews fit in, or didn’t fit in,’‘ Mr. Eban said and offered an example:

‘’We begin when the two civilizations were Egypt and Sumer, what is now Iraq. They were sort of the Soviet Union and United States of those times, enormous powers with enormous wealth. And all of a sudden you find a tablet in the year 1234 in which one of the Egyptian kings says, ‘I conquered those stubborn Israelites.’

‘’In other words, apart from the Bible nobody would have known Jews existed at all. People ask how is it that nobody talks about the Jews in antiquity except the Jews themselves? Suppose there wasn’t a Bible, how would you know they existed? Well, we have this tablet, and I would ask why should these powerful empires have cared about a scraggly little people with no temples, no monuments and no armies? Because they were making a nuisance of themselves.’‘

The series, a feast of research, language and photography, moves from the ancient Near East and the destruction of an Israelite kingdom with the exile of its people to Babylonia and then through classical Greece and Rome and the spread of Jewish ideas to the Hellenistic world of the Eastern Mediterranean. There follows the rise of the Christian and Islamic movements and, despite periodic persecution, a golden age for Jews in Islamic Spain in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. It is a crucial period for Judaism, and not all that well known, Mr. Eban believes.

‘’I must say in all frankness,’‘ he commented, ‘’the lack of knowledge that Jews have about themselves is almost as great as the lack of knowledge that gentiles have of Jews. Among American Jews, especially, there’s a consciousness of heritage, and a pride in it, but that doesn’t mean there’s knowledge of it.’‘

Mr. Eban wondered how many among them would know ‘’that Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, or that one in 10 people in Spain was Jewish, or that the Spanish-Jewish community was like the American- Jewish community today in terms of prosperity and prestige - where a Jew could be Prime Minister of Granada or doctor to the king, and where as great a scholar as Maimonides could flourish?’‘

And he said that helps to understand what happens later, ‘’the enormous trauma that followed the expulsion when Jews went after all sorts of mystical experiences and false Messiahs.’‘ And the series follows them, through the French Revolution, the ghettos, the American experience, the birth of Zionism, the Holocaust and Israel.

Mr. Eban said his own involvement in the television project began in 1978 when he was writing ‘’The New Diplomacy’‘ at Princeton University and ‘’had a thought about doing a series on diplomacy, a picturesque subject. So, I went to PBS and they said it was a very interesting idea.’‘ They were in touch on that ‘’when I got a call saying they had an offer from a foundation on another subject, equally cognate to your interest.’‘

The Charles H. Revson Foundation was offering $48,000 for a ‘’feasibility report on a series concerning the Jews. That meant somebody writing some memoranda.’‘ Later, the foundation gave $1 million and others, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, provided the rest. ‘’The figure started at $4 million, went to $10 million and we’re still looking,’‘ he said.

‘’They thought of me in what they called the Kenneth Clark role,’‘ a reference to the author, producer and host of ‘’Civilization,’‘ the 1970 BBC series. ‘’They wanted somebody with a television resonance,’‘ Mr. Eban said. ‘’And they indicated that my willingness to accept had something to do with whether they went ahead with the project. It’s what they call the recognition factor in television.’‘

The series, he said, had to be done well ‘’because you pre-empt the subject by doing it. It’s not like if you do ‘Thornbirds’ somebody else does ‘Dallas.’ If we do this, nobody would be crazy enough to try it again for a decade. So, we went to the museums and photographed even if they had been done a hundred times. For one thing, film is better now than it was even five years ago.’‘

Mr. Eban wrote memorandums, he said, suggesting how he thought the series should be blocked out, but the scripts were done in New York under the direction of Arnold Labaton, executive producer; John Fox, series producer, and Marc Siegel, senior editorial consultant. Each segment had a ‘’different evolution,’‘ Mr. Fox explained in a telephone interview, with researchers and consultants playing crucial roles.

As chief consultant and host, Mr. Eban does most of the ‘’voice-overs,’‘ or narration, and all of the ‘’stand-uppers,’‘ or sequences filmed at sites important to the series. He said that he had ‘’Ebanized’‘ some of the language ‘’because people know how I speak. They expect a certain turn of phrase from me.’‘ The diplomat grinned: ‘’People will call this ‘The Eban Show,’ so if there is something strident or incongruous I wouldn’t want it to stay there.

‘’They had academic consultants for each part,’‘ he said. ‘’We tried not to be too pedantic, but we did want to be accurate. There were some people at Princeton who looked at the Muslim parts, we went to Duke University for the Christian Bible parts and we went to the Jewish Theological Seminary for the viewpoint of acceptability to Jewish traditionalists.’‘

Not all went smoothly. ‘’We went to a very historic synagogue in Bevis Marks, and it was covered. It was the original synagogue of the Montefiores, one of the old Sephardic families of England. And we had the same experience at Westminster,’‘ another London landmark where renovation also was under way, ‘’but that didn’t matter because there were so many films of it,’‘ Mr. Eban said.

At Westminster, he continued, ‘’we wanted to discuss the fact that in the early 19th century a Jew named Lionel Rothschild was elected to Parliament for the constituency of Westminster, but they wouldn’t let him in because he wouldn’t swear an oath on the true faith of a Christian. It went on for 11 years. He was elected six times, which demonstrates the fidelity of the British electorate. Finally, he was admitted, and the irony is that once he was admitted he didn’t say a damn word in Parliament all his life.’‘

The stories moved easily, in Mr. Eban’s office and through a living room of friends who had just seen excerpts from four segments of the series. They were stunned by the handsome photography and by the impact, especially of the Spanish period and by the story of the Black Death, when thousands of Jews were put to death after being blamed wrongly for the bubonic plague that swept Europe in the 14th century.

But there is more than misery in the series, a point that Mr. Eban also sought to emphasize: ‘’This is educational, but not so much in the sense of schools. We try to give the very large public a clearer image of what Jewishness means. How do we appear now? - Jew as victim and Jew as antagonist. Those elements of the Jewish experience that are not related to violence do not tend to get their full weight.’‘

The viewer will also get a measure of Mr. Eban’s political thinking: ‘’You can write Jewish history without a Zionist emphasis, in which Israel is not the origin and destination of Jewish history, but that would not have been acceptable to me.’‘ He also said there was ‘’not a hint of anti- Arab propaganda in the series, although it will get a bit complicated when we get to the Israeli part of the show,’‘ the final segment.

That segment was still being filmed as Mr. Eban spoke. A few days earlier he had been outside Government House in Jerusalem, the walls of the Old City reflecting a setting sun, as he sought through several ‘’takes’‘ to convey the emotions of the founding of the Jewish State. First a dog barked, then a helicopter flew past ‘’and then a fly settled on my nose, which they felt made the sequence sacrilegious, so we kept doing it.’‘

Mr. Eban, at the age of 69 and with a career that has touched oratorical heights, remains new to the television process. ‘’The frustration with television is the amount you have to produce for the little you eventually show. You start it well, full of strangled emotion, but when you get to the sixth or seventh time it begins to endanger your work.’‘

Still, some of the sequences included extemporaneous material. At Dachau, the Nazi death camp, John Fox, the series’ producer, recalled that Mr. Eban unexpectedly went beyond the script. ‘’He said we should ‘think of it as a monument, not a monument to beauty or to wealth, but a monument to cruelty.’ It was his reaction to the place, and we left it in.’‘