Simon Schama
Simon Schama
Simon Michael Schama, CBEis an English historian specializing in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York. He first came to popular public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. In the United Kingdom, he is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain broadcast between 2000 and 2002...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth13 February 1945
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.
The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.
Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers.
It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.
In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.
I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory.
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.
I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor.
she writes family scenes better than anyone else I can think of.
Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept.
My father read Dickens out loud. My mother would say 'We're going to the workhouse'. This to me was real. I was headed for the gruel.
Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a braised mushroom, other than a lot of braised mushrooms.
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.