Jewish Quotations

Judaism and Christianity in themselves are distinctly separate entities, to be sure; but when considering their influence on Western thought, we must bear in mind that Christianity alone, or almost alone, transmitted the Jewish share, simply by what it contained of it in its own, original constitution.

When I listen to the complaints that follow just about every presidential debate, I'm reminded of the well-worn joke about the Jewish mother who buys her son two shirts. When he shows up at dinner wearing one, she says: 'What's the matter? You didn't like the other one?'

Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.

I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.

My track record is that I have always sought to work with warmth and in a constructive way with the leaders of other components of the Jewish faith.

I and others like me believe Timerman was chosen by President Kirshner, first as Argentina's U.N. ambassador and then as foreign minister, among other reasons because he does not hide his Jewishness and his relations with the Jewish community and, therefore, can be a 'fig leaf' for her policy.

Even a secret agent can't lie to a Jewish mother.

I was born in Berlin on March 15, 1830, the second son of the royal university professor K. W. L. Heyse and his wife Julie, nee Saaling, who came from a Jewish family.

When I was a little kid, it was not uncommon for a cousin or an uncle, before they would even say 'Hello,' to gush, 'You know, your mother's brisket is just incredible; it's so good.' That was an inspiration for creating a love song in that well-worn terrain of the relationship between a Jewish boy and his mother.

If I had been prime minister, I would have offered apologies to the Dutch Jewish community without hesitation. This would refer both to our government's attitude during the Second World War and to the very late postwar discovery that the restitution process had been poorly conceived.

We must work together to strengthen Jerusalem as a modern, open capital and to foster welcoming, inclusive communities across the Jewish world. It is vital to the health and vibrancy of the global Jewish future and to ensuring a strong Israel.

If you are a Rothschild, a Rosenwald, a Gimbel, or even a Waldbaum, growing up Jewish can be a rich experience. For the rest of us, it could be just so-so.

My father left me with his love of Jewish studies and cultural life. To this very day, along with several physicians and scientist colleagues, I take regular periodical lessons taught by a Rabbinical scholar on how the Jewish law views moral and ethical problems related to modern medicine and science.

At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.

Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser.

I was terrified, terrified in 'Songwriter,' because there I was, New York Jewish girl, singing country-western onstage with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. I mean, forget it. I was so terrified.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school, and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions.

I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.

I'll tell you that when an innocent person is killed, we never go about asking or inquiring whether they were Jewish or Christian or Muslim. That's not our way or creed.

I got to thinking about the Book of Revelation that was written by a Jewish prophet who was also a follower of Jesus who hated the Roman Empire. I realized that the Book of Revelation could be a way to reflect on the issue of religion's relationship to politics.

All sorts of other lies are being spread today, I do not know what else they will invent. I've heard that I'm of Jewish descent, but I found, I knew of my ancestors in Zagorje from around 350 years ago, and I said, maybe it would be good to have some of that, I guess I would be richer, I might not have become a Communist.

The ancient Jewish people gave the world the vision of eternal peace, of universal disarmament, of abolishing the teaching and learning of war.

My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.

To tell you the truth, in the old Jewish shtetls, if your husband died, sometimes they'd have you marry the brother, and my grandparents were actually stepbrother and stepsister.

That room was not available, and the only other room had been booked for a Jewish bar mitzvah. I called the father and told him I needed the room and I would pay him to move the bar mitzvah to an adjoining room which was smaller.

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.

Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.

As a matter of fact, part of being Jewish is the whole question of what it is to be a Jew.

I'm very spiritual and I'm Jewish by faith. I'm not a practising Jew, I'm more of a recreational Jew. I celebrate the holidays and I try to inform my kids about their heritage because I think we all at some point have to defend our heritage and if they get picked on I want them to know why.

I came when I was in high school as part of a student exchange program with the Jewish Community Center in New Jersey, to Ramat Eliyahu. You come and volunteer for five weeks at a day camp. I was a teenager - I couldn't really appreciate it as much, and now I come back as an adult and I can really get the flavor of the city, and I love it.

I believe young people hold the key to building a vibrant global Jewish future, and we must invest in their passion and potential to do so.

It will not do to say that international law is the enemy of the Jewish people, since the Jewish people surely did not as a whole oppose the Nuremburg trials, or the development of human rights law.

I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community.

Across all religions in the United States, people 18-30 are more spiritual than before, but they don't like organized religion. What sets Birthright apart is that no one's hitting on you to be Jewish in any particular way, and you can define Jewish any way you want.

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.

Religion triggers a lot of emotions in me, most of which stem from being raised Jewish in a very Baptist community in the South. I didn't believe any of it from an early age - the clubby quality of whatever religion or church you belonged to, Judaism included. It just struck me as foolish.

I don't really know of the Jewish tradition of comedy, only the Jewish tradition of not keeping your mouth shut. Complaining about all that is hard, unfair or ridiculous in life-having strong feelings, and not being able to suppress them. That, to me, is Jewish.

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

Creating a meal for my friends and family, sitting together, eating, laughing and talking - that is when I am so happy. Oh my God, if you could see how much food I make - I am the original Jewish mother.

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

I feel that I am completely in solidarity with Jews in the world, because I know what it is to be a Jew. I've seen what it is; I am myself of Jewish origin, and therefore I can only be fully in support of the idea that the Jews, after all they've suffered, need a country where they are at home.

In my 40s - when I was giving to the Red Cross, United Jewish Appeal and other charities - I said to myself, this is all well and good, but these are really amorphous things, and maybe there are some causes out there that I really give a damn about.

The first time someone tried to share the Gospel with me, I naively explained that I was Jewish and born in Israel, thank you... This was a big mistake. In certain parts of Christian America, admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned me into walking catnip.

By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass.

To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one's sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people.

I think the thing that I most appreciate now is that stereotypes involving Jewish identity activate fears of persecution that exist in the present day.

We should never forget that Hollywood was built by Europeans, and the old Jewish boys from Eastern Europe.

Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.

When you're 5 ft. 5 in., have a round Jewish face and wear glasses and refuse to wear contacts, you're going to get offered certain parts. People thought of me as the nerdy guy, even in non-nerdy parts like 'Parenthood.' I didn't feel the need to change anything I was doing - I embraced it.

I realized that we have to do everything we can to preserve the Jewish race. I'm very proud of it, and I think it's wonderful.

November is Jewish book month, so Jewish Community Centers all around the country have book fairs where they invite authors and sell books in advance of the holidays.

The Jewish people can do a lot of good if we stay united and strong - Israel and the Diaspora working together. If we don't, I always worry about the continuation of the Jewish people in Israel and abroad.

The majesty of the American Jewish experience is in its success marrying its unique Jewish identity with the larger, liberal values of the United States. There is no need anymore to choose between assimilation and separation. We are accepted as equals.

The Jewish tradition presents itself as the greatest revelation of God's truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves 'the chosen people.' It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah.

This type of gathering is unprecedented. The time has come for Christians to publicly affirm our Jewish roots, distinctions and oneness in Jesus Christ.

On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and - over the years - have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego.

Seattle is like a global gumbo, a melting pot with all kinds of people - the rich, the poor, white people, some Chinese, Filipino, Jewish and black people - they're all here.

I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.

One of the great virtues, apart from the pleasure of performing these works, is that it's opened up an entirely new, expansive repertoire of American Jewish music.

The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.

The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' 'Silver Bells' and 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)' were all written by Jews.

According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein's monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset that I was born a white Jewish male. I've been angry since.

The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.

One cannot accept Christ and still be part of the normative Jewish community; one cannot live by Torah and still be part of the Church.

I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.

Through these offices it was my privilege to get to know almost every Jewish person, and those whom I did not come to know through these offices I came to know through love and a desire to know my brethren, the members of my people.

You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.

The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.'

There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million.

The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life.

I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there.

I had always known that I was Jewish - we celebrated the holidays, we went to a synagogue - but I had never known that I was supposed to feel ashamed about it.

Through educational programming, Jewish American History Month will help raise the awareness of a people, their history and contributions. It will help combat anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that is on the rise and that unfortunately still exists in our Nation.

I never felt like a good Jew. My mother was not Jewish, and that makes me a non-Jew according to Jewish religious law.

My six handbooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events mostly followed the trajectory of my adult Jewish life.

A Jewish community that is diverse and openly embraces all who seek to lead actively Jewish lives will be a Jewish community that is stronger and more enduring for generations to come.

I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.

What is it to keep kosher? Is it eating kosher potato chips? Kosher is a bigger idea. I think it's about being healthy. But according to some people, it's about not eating this food because it's forbidden by the Jewish law. My view of the halachah changed a little bit. The laws are there hopefully to be a tool.

Across the Jewish community, the MLK Shabbat Suppers are part of Repair the World's multi-year effort to mobilize Jews across the nation to serve as tutors, mentors, and college access coaches for public school children.

Honestly, what can really be said about 'the Jewish people' as a whole? Is it not a lamentable stereotype to make large generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the same political commitments?

I didn't know I was Jewish until I encountered anti-Semitism at the age of 10, when my best friend told me I couldn't come to their house because I was a Jew.

We are a country that lacks riches. The Jewish brain, that's what we have. Everything that we've had and will have in this country is the direct and clear product of higher education. If we harm this system, we will drastically decline and cease to exist.

I'm Jewish and respect the traditions of Judaism, but through all the time I've spent photographing nature, I also have a deep appreciation for the power of the universe. No, not the power of the universe, but just celebrating life.

As our parents planted for us, so will we plant for our children. When Charlie and I began our philanthropic journey, we wanted to focus our resources on planting seeds that would help perpetuate Jewish values and traditions for future generations and also contribute to repairing our world.

I may discuss love, and I don't mind if two men fall in love, fine. Two women, fine. But I flinch when I think of two Jewish women getting together and having a child because the idea of having two Jewish mothers makes my head explode. I have one; I couldn't handle two.

It's based around a Jewish family but it really is a universal theme about getting along and coming along.

I am proud to state that every national Jewish organization we support enforces non-discrimination practices around sexual orientation and that more than 70 percent have written policies in place covering gender identity and expression.

Jews have been in Egypt since Biblical times, and Alexandria had once been, at least partially, a Jewish city.

I've liked being Jewish in America - there's a secular version of Jewishness there that's more about bagels and jokes than going to synagogues.

Mainstream media has convinced people that black people aren't relatable. So when a Jewish person comes up to me and is all, 'Oh man, I love that one scene from Episode 3, I watch it over and over again,' I'm so happy. Because that's what I want.

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.

Our policy is very simple. The Jewish state was set up to defend Jewish lives, and we always reserve the right to defend ourselves.

I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law - to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world.

We have our own values; we build our own special, our JEWISH life - and we are proud, so very proud.

The Romans weren't trying to kill all the Jews, but they did destroy Jewish resistance to Roman rule. Jerusalem was turned into a Roman army camp, and it was a total devastation.