{"id":785,"date":"2009-03-30T16:33:58","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T16:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/03\/a-relatively-non-controversial.html"},"modified":"2009-03-30T16:33:58","modified_gmt":"2009-03-30T16:33:58","slug":"a-relatively-non-controversial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/03\/a-relatively-non-controversial.html","title":{"rendered":"High Def Jerusalem:  PBS&#8217; Non-Controversial (But Pretty!) Look at the &#8220;Center of the World&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/imgs\/jerusalem%20image%20--%20broad%20shot.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"jerusalem image -- broad shot.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/128\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/03\/jerusalem image -- broad shot-thumb-550x309-4030.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"309\" class=\"mt-image-center\" style=\"text-align: center;margin: 0 auto 20px\" \/><\/a><\/span><br \/>\nIs it possible to have a non-controversial two hour documentary about Jerusalem?<br \/>\nPBS seems to have achieved that goal, without making it boring, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/jerusalem\/\">&#8220;Jerusalem: Center of the World.&#8221;<\/a>  Correspondent Ray Suarez and producer Andrew Goldberg raced through 4,000 years of history without managing to infuriate anyone. (It helps that they pretty much skipped over the controversies of the last 50 years).  &#8220;I&#8217;m a religious guy and perfectly happy to tell anyone who asks,&#8221;  Suarez told me. &#8220;But I had to make sure I didn&#8217;t have my thumb on the scale.&#8221;<br \/>\nThey offer little in the way of provocative revisionist history, sticking mostly to what the holy books of Christianity, Judaism and Islam claim.   To make up for that familiar history\/lore, they offer us a visually captivating High Definition experience using rarely seen footage &#8212; including inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock.  (The photo below is the rock from which Mohammed, according to Islamic tradition, took flight to heaven).  The net result is captivating.<br \/>\nIf there&#8217;s one figure who comes off better than others it&#8217;s Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who ejected Christian crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187 but offered them greater freedom than Christians had to Muslims.  What can modern leaders learn from Saladin?  &#8220;There is a way that everyone in religious terms can have the Jerusalem they need,&#8221; Suarez says.  The key ingredients to the formula: &#8220;access, peace and a little  space for each other.&#8221;<br \/>\nSuarez says he also came to understand more viscerally that people in Jerusalem believe they are fighting not only for themselves for invisible hordes of others who believ ein the idea of Jerusalem.  &#8220;There are people with an emotional connection to Jerusalem who will never see the place&#8230;. That emotional tug makes it very difficult to form a compromise on the ground&#8230;they have unasked for constituencies across the planet.&#8221;<br \/>\nThe special airs Wednesday, April 1  at 9 pm ET\/PT.<br \/>\n<span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/imgs\/Dome%20of%20the%20Rock.JPG\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Dome of the Rock.JPG\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/128\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/03\/Dome of the Rock-thumb-550x365-4031.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"365\" class=\"mt-image-center\" style=\"text-align: center;margin: 0 auto 20px\" \/><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is it possible to have a non-controversial two hour documentary about Jerusalem? PBS seems to have achieved that goal, without making it boring, with &#8220;Jerusalem: Center of the World.&#8221; Correspondent Ray Suarez and producer Andrew Goldberg raced through 4,000 years of history without managing to infuriate anyone. (It helps that they pretty much skipped over&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>High Def Jerusalem: PBS&#039; Non-Controversial (But Pretty!) Look at the &quot;Center of the World&quot; - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/03\/a-relatively-non-controversial.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"High Def Jerusalem: PBS&#039; Non-Controversial (But Pretty!) Look at the &quot;Center of the World&quot; - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is it possible to have a non-controversial two hour documentary about Jerusalem? PBS seems to have achieved that goal, without making it boring, with &#8220;Jerusalem: Center of the World.&#8221; Correspondent Ray Suarez and producer Andrew Goldberg raced through 4,000 years of history without managing to infuriate anyone. (It helps that they pretty much skipped over&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/03\/a-relatively-non-controversial.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-03-30T16:33:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"swaldman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"High Def Jerusalem: PBS' Non-Controversial (But Pretty!) 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. 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