[Richard Quest, Cnn:] Hello, I'm Richard Quest at CNN in New York with the news of the Federal Reserve's latest meeting. The Federal Reserve has decided not to begin tapering its bond purchases at this latest September meeting. In an announcement just a few moments ago, the Fed now says that the U.S. economy remains very weak and the committee decided to await more evidence before adjusting the pace of its purchases. The Federal Reserve, the open market committee, has decided to continue purchasing U.S. bonds at the rate of $85 billion a month, $40 billion in long-term in treasuries and $45 billion in mortgage-backed securities. Now this is an extraordinary result, since most of the market had been expecting that the Fed would start the tapering process at this meeting. And if we look at the Dow Jones industrials, you'll see exactly how the market has reacted. The Dow is now up 106 points. But focus closely on the red to the left and the little smidgen of green to the right, because the market had been down 30-40 odd points throughout the session. And then we get this announcement of no tapering. And the reason the market likes it, because more cheap money will clearly be being pumped into the economy for the foreseeable future. So the Fed decides tapering will not take place now. Everyone knows that tapering is on the way. But with the U.S. economy still in a weakened position, the Fed has decided now is not the time to begin cutting back. I'm Richard Quest in New York.
[Amanpour:] And welcome back to the program. It's an old story that in the Middle East Jews and Muslims sometimes have struggled to live side by side. But it is not as old as you might think. Noted historian Simon Schama explains in his new book and documentary, "The Story of the Jews."
[Simon Schama, British Historian:] In our own age of bitter hatreds, it's not so easy to believe, but over 1,000 years ago, Cairo was home to one of the most thriving Jewish communities in the world. And that story was repeated across the eastern Mediterranean and in Arabia itself, the birthplace of a powerful new monotheistic faith, Islam.
[Amanpour:] Schama's story of the Jews spans thousands of years and thousands of miles, as it expands the focus far beyond the well-known tragic stories of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I asked him about his latest project, as well as his take on Syria, another place where Jews once thrived. He had joined me earlier this week in the studio. Simon Schama, welcome.
[Schama:] Thank you.
[Amanpour:] Thank you for joining me.
[Schama:] Pleasure.
[Amanpour:] So the book, the film series on television, "The Story of the Jews," I was staggered by the sheer exuberance of it, the enthusiasm, the sort of joyfulness of the pieces that I have seen so far. And it is actually in stark contradiction to what one reviewer basically wrote, "Jewish history is not all a lachrymose chronicle of persecution," and that you had done a splendid job of shattering certain stereotypes. Was that your aim?
[Schama:] Yes, it was. I mean, it seemed to me particularly to the non- Jewish world, Jews are mostly defined and Jewish history through the frame of Auschwitz and the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now you can't run away from that, but that of course is not the whole story. And it seems to me that if you actually feel you might be in trouble every so often, you learn to live the other side of life, the exuberant, life- hungry side of it. Part of the other reason why I should do this series is to make connections really between the whole long story of the Jews. The Jews have not lived separately, you know, until they've been forced to by other people or their own sense of nervousness, as with the security fence in Israel has made them to do that. The default mode for Jewish life is not to self-ghettoize. So Jewish history has been American history and Russian history and British history and French history and German history. The film you saw, I was very concerned not to predetermine it. It ends in a sad place in the Holocaust Memorial. But the thrust of that program said, what one place where it looked as though everything was going to turn out fine?. Here it is. It's called Germany. And that's the important thing to do because people who have come to the Jewish story are who are not Jews, are nervous. They're nervous of either a kind of Jewish truculence or they're nervous of patronizing victims of the Holocaust. And part of the series states stop being so nervous. We're all in this together.
[Amanpour:] I was struck by what you've said in some of the program, that this is a story about tolerance.
[Schama:] Yes.
[Amanpour:] About learning to live together and to share, and the historic figures that you profile there, Jewish figures, who actually went against the grain, and wanted to have tolerance between different religions.
[Schama:] Right, right. The Jews have lived this issue of the difficulty, the pain of existing with people with whom they don't agree about fundamental principles more extremely than everybody else. They've not had a unique experience. They've lived it, of course, with such extraordinary intensity. So that is, you know, the sense where you can find someone like Moses Mendelssohn in the 18th century, the first Jewish intellectual celebrity, who's a religious Jew, but his best friend is a non-religious, extraordinarily kind of rational non-Jewish figure; that seemed very important. I say in that film, hanging out with people who are not your same faith seems so obvious now. But it was completely revolutionary then.
[Amanpour:] You talk about Syria in some of your programs. There's beautiful scenes of Jewish life in Syria. And obviously, you know, and actually quite a lot of Jewish life in the Middle East that actually was quite flourishing, for instance, in Egypt at a certain point in history. And I guess today, when we have the Syria story and we see the, you know, the terrible suffering, I wonder what you think when you see the realpolitik which has been victorious in this sort of arms control deal between Syria now and the United States and
[Schama:] Well, I myself am terribly conflicted about that because, on the one hand, you can't go through a long project like this in which the relationship between ethics and power is at the heart of the modern history. It still haunts Israeli life. It's why a lot of my friends who are writing the stories of the Jews who are novelists, like David Grossman, are kind of haunted about whether or not actually ethics comes first and power comes second, or whether we have an obligation to think about our survival. But there's the other Schama, like, you know, the other Christiane, who knows, you know, who's got his what's the 500th anniversary that's most important this year, Young Amanpour? It's Machiavelli's "The Prince." And Machiavelli, who looks weirdly like Vladimir Putin, same skinny face and beady little eyes, actually, they could have been brothers, Machiavelli and Putin, Machiavelli's point was out of unvirtuous calculations, things for the good of all can arise. So it's a bit much, a bit rich when Vladimir Putin takes to lecturing America in "The New York Times." He is, after all, an oligarchical, self- perpetuating, time-serving bully in Russia. But even those -he's perfectly like Cesare Borgia. He's capable of delivering some things you cannot but say is for the good of this particular misery.
[Amanpour:] Of course. But then when you talk about humanity, the humanitarian suffering will continue because it is just an arms control agreement. If it works, great; but it won't stop the war. So what do you say, having, you know, done this incredible history, to people about their apparent disaffection? They can't be bothered, as the saying goes now in England, the fact that publics are so against helping out those who are being killed
[Schama:] It'll come back to haunt us. It came back to haunt us in the 1930s when, you know, I mean once they get one scene not in the film, "The King's Speech," was Neville Chamberlain on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, waving his disgusting little piece of paper with thousands and thousands of people cheering him on. That came back to haunt the sense in which the most important thing is our own self-protection. Czechoslovakia, a faraway place of which we know little, nothing, whatever it was, that is it was a mistake. But again, it's very I won't say it's the Jewish position, but it is a Jewish position really to want to do more than wring your hands. Of course in the back of our minds is the sense in which I say on Program Five, it's not what the Nazis did to the Jews that makes a case for Israel. It's what everybody else failed to do.
[Amanpour:] Your film also is a story of survival of the Jews, despite the considerable odds. Does that have a special resonance today, do you think?
[Schama:] Well, I think it does. The peculiarity of that Jewish story is that you think you have to survive through the usual markers, which will give you power armies, states, institutions and territory. And that was all ripped away from the Jews. And all they had was a sense of their portable memory, written in the Bible, but in many in the Talmud and many other books, too. So in some sense, that's why we began the whole series actually with Sigmund Freud, who came to realize that whatever else happened to the Jews, the life of the mind, the life of the spirit, the life of reflection was not just a kind of sentimental luxury. It was actually the key to endurance.
[Amanpour:] So your series is airing now on the BBC. Your book is out in the U.K. It'll be airing in the spring and the book will come out in the United States in the spring. What do you want the takeaway to be, if I can be so crass? What is the takeaway that you want people to really hang onto [inaudible] in the book?
[Schama:] I think the work of toleration is very, very hard and the peace of the world depends on it, almost as much as thinking about the fate of the planet, the ecology of human beliefs. And what happened to the Jews has happened in other measure to other people, it's that we've lit it very dramatically; we've written about it. We've made it the heart of our story. But it's the celebration and the lament.
[Amanpour:] Simon Schama, fantastic. Thank you very much indeed.
[Schama:] It's a pleasure, Christiane.
[Amanpour:] And as we've seen, the one constant in the Middle East is change. That seems to be especially true today in Iran. And after the break, the story of another remarkable woman.