Jewish History Series
2,000 years of Jewish History in 20 videos
Illustration by Stu Sufrin
Developing the Idea
About three years before this was created, I wanted to make a single video covering the history of the Jews from the destruction of the second temple leading up to right before the Holocaust.
My boss, feeling it was too ambitious and no one would care to watch, called this video, “Jeremy’s Folly.”
In time, it expanded to a desire to make a series of twenty videos, each covering roughly a hundred years of history in five minute segments.
To date, I’ve directed and produced 18 videos on Jewish History stretching from around the year 0 all the way through the 19th Century. These were created at two separate companies, as well as independently, and are some of the work I’m most proud of. While I never planned on becoming such a history geek, there’s no turning back now.
Above are two of the ten videos I produced at OpenDor Media. You can see the full list at ‘The Jewish Story’ link.
Drew (Doron) Feldman directed, and I had a heavy hand in editing the scripts.
The two below are part of a seven part video series that I wrote, directed, edited, and narrated myself, along with interviewing a series of experts. I directed and hired the brilliant animator, Stu Sufrin, who made the visuals, and I hired Elijah Aaron who poured his heart into making truly special background music. These were created at BimBam, with script editing oversight by the incomparable Sarah Lefton.
Over 800,000 viewers.
And finally, the video below I created independently, soup to nuts.
I’m not quite done chasing this white whale, and so I’m making a few more videos on Jewish history in 2024 before finally moving on.
Impact
Illustration by Stu Sufrin
The videos are getting hundreds of thousands of views. Anecdotally, I’ve had many teachers write me saying how helpful these videos were in teaching the subjects and how nothing like this has ever existed before.