British historian Simon Schama made his third visit to The Colbert Report earlier this month to plug his new book dropping April 1 and accompanying PBS program that begins airing locally tonight and are both titled The Story of the Jews.
Or, if you play your Rosh Hashana Cards right, you can wait until April 6 to, as Schama tells Stephen Colbert, subject yourself to a five-hour “Jew-a-thon.”
]
For the piecemeal approach to the five-hour series, which follows Schama from Russia and the Ukraine to Egypt, Israel and Spain to explore the imprint Jewish culture has made on the world, parts 1 and 2 are shown tonight starting at 8 on Costa Mesa-based PBS SoCaL. Parts 3-5 follow on Tuesday, April 1, also beginning at 8 p.m.
As Schama reveals in the Colbert interview (sorry for the commercial!), all five parts are shown April 6.
Local support for The Story of the Jews is provided by the Harry & Belle Krupnick Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, according to PBS SoCaL.
Email: mc****@******ly.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!

OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.