Winner of the coveted Peabody Award, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews is the monumental nine-part series hosted by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Abba Eban. This epic production from public television station Thirteen/WNET New York traces the history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present, telling their story as part of the broader history of Western civilization. Five years in the making, and filmed on four continents, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews became a landmark, a television portrait of the Jewish experience with a scope and depth that is unlikely to ever be duplicated. Now, after a national public television broadcast, it will be available for the first time in a dramatically expanded form including on DVD with an interactive DVD-ROM.

Heritage: Civilization and the Jews is a deluxe four-disc DVD boxed set. The set includes nine hour-long episodes on three DVDs and the Heritage Interactive DVD-Rom. The DVDs include maps and excerpts from Encyclopedia Judaica, which can be explored in more depth on the accompanying DVD-Rom.

The comprehensive DVD-Rom, Heritage Interactive, is an “interactive museum of Jewish experience”, which includes over 650 annotated historical documents; 541 map views with over 2,250 explanatory essays; over 3,600 encyclopedia articles; 4,000 captions that accompany the 9 hours of original series video; over 100 interactive multimedia presentations containing over 800 historical images; an unlimited book marking system; a built-in ‘Help’ feature, and a fully searchable index of over 7000 multimedia elements.

Features
The DVD-Rom includes:
Full Nine Hour Original Series Video
Heritage Interactive is organized into five interconnected components. The nine hours of the television series will form the core of this new product. Users can choose to watch the programs full-screen or in a window accompanied by tools for rapidly navigating and exploring the video. Every image will be annotated, so that, with a click of the mouse, a user can learn the name of each work of art or the location of any important site that appears on screen.

Historical Documents
Original documents from every period of Jewish history will be included: sacred texts, eyewitness accounts, political treaties, and literary works. Documents of a more personal nature - letters and journals - will also be included to offer glimpses of everyday life long ago.

Multimedia Presentations
Combining sound, video, graphics, animation, and text, these exhibits will constitute a multimedia museum of the art, artifacts, and documents of Jewish history. Selections will include biographies, brief documentaries on historical issues, and audio guided tours of past times and places. One exhibit might include readings of poetry from the golden age of Spanish Jewry. Another might narrate the life of the founder of Hadassah. Yet another might let users sample klezmer music and learn the role it played in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Linked together in intriguing ways, these presentations will add significantly to the amount of material in the original series.

Historical Atlas
Almost a thousand full-color maps will enable users to follow the odyssey of the Jews from their captivity in ancient Egypt to their role in shaping the modern world. Users can zoom in until the streets of Jerusalem fill the screen or pull back to gain a view of the entire earth. Specially designed to change dramatically, the maps will allow the user to move quickly through history and watch as empires come and go, and cities rise to prominence or fall into neglect. The maps are also extensively annotated so that the user need only click on a city, a trade route, or an important site, to learn of its role in the culture or politics of its time.

Encyclopedia
An abridged version of the Encyclopedia Judaica, the unparalleled 16-volume reference work published in 1973, will be available in electronic form. This edition, produced specially for Heritage Interactive by the editors of Encyclopedia Judaica, will include almost a third of the articles of the full Encyclopedia, abbreviated for ease of use in the computer environment.

Index
A powerful index will allow users to locate quickly and easily any map, article, document, or section of video. Users can take advantage of a special set of tools to create their own pathways through Heritage Interactive, browsing the material by date, region, culture, and subject of interest. A set of simple choices will allow the user to focus on a specific topic such as architecture, religion, or literature, and explore the relevant documents, maps and video.

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