We have collected the best Jewish Quotes by famous authors including Benjamin Netanyahu, Itzhak Perlman, Jack Schwartz, Yair Lapid, David Berman and many others, we hope that among them you will find the right thought.
We want Israel as a democratic and Jewish state. So you have to maintain a Jewish majority, and you want to do that by legal means, by democratic means.
Benjamin Netanyahu
I am humbled and honored to receive the Genesis Prize, recognizing not just my professional achievements and my desire to improve the world, but also my commitment to my Jewish identity, Jewish values, and Jewish culture.
Itzhak Perlman
Without a Jewish state, the iron truth of history is that the Jewish people sooner or later become even more vulnerable to the next wave of anti-Semitism.
Jack Schwartz
I don’t feel we need a declaration from the Palestinians that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Yair Lapid
I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.
David Berman
I’m either mentally ill or Jewish. I can’t sometimes tell the difference.
Roseanne Barr
Unfortunately, the diplomatic destruction Netanyahu is causing will lead Israel to lose its Jewish majority and become a binational state. This unfortunate fact is something no law can hide.
Isaac Herzog
But, when I toil in the field of Jewish culture which I frequently do, I am indeed a Jewish artist.
Theodore Bikel
I noticed that people were craving a way of reinterpreting tradition and of being Jewish without joining a synagogue.
Jill Soloway
My mom is Episcopalian; my dad is ancestrally Jewish but personally atheist. After their divorce, however, my dad married a Jewish spiritual director, and I became fascinated by the traditions she brought into our lives.
Chloe Benjamin
I’m just tired of people saying I’m a self-hating Jew because I’m critical of Israel or make fun of old Jewish ladies. I do not hate myself. And Jews who criticize Israel aren’t necessarily mentally ill.
Harvey Pekar
I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn’t trust anybody outside. You’d bring someone home, and the first question was, ‘Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?’
Judith Butler
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.
Fred Melamed
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.
Garry Shandling
They just think I’m a white dude. Every once in a while someone thinks I’m Jewish. I get a lot of stuff, but never Latino.
James Roday
There are very close ties between the Jewish and Mormon people.
Chuck Schumer
People can certainly take pride in the fact that there is a Jewish candidate for president who has received delegates and who has run a terrific campaign and still work hard to ensure we elect Hillary Clinton.
Ted Deutch
Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.
Robert Gottlieb
I believe that for the small numbers of Jewish people in the United States, they exercise a tremendous amount of influence on the affairs of government.
Louis Farrakhan
I’m half Jewish, I’m half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It’s like, What is he doing?
Lenny Kravitz
Not only are Feiglin’s people radicals and fascists but also the bearers of severe personal disturbances, which hide behind a layer of patriotic make-up under the camouflage of the Jewish faith.
Yossi Sarid
In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!
Bernadette Peters
I am the ultimate Jewish mother.
Karen Katz
Freud was the son of a Jewish merchant who had to move his whole family to Vienna because he couldn’t get work. He, as a boy, had to watch his father be mocked and abused on the street for being Jewish… You develop a thick skin and you develop a certain kind of wit to defend yourself.
Viggo Mortensen
Nobody cares if you’re black, white, straight, gay, Christian, Jewish, whatever it may be. When you step on that field, you’re a member, in my case, the 49ers. That’s your job, your occupation.
Colin Kaepernick
The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life.
Abraham Cahan
As I was growing up, you know, I’m a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother’s family had fled the czars of Russia before that.
Eugene Jarecki
Arabs don’t have to be the victims of the Jewish war between Lieberman and Netanyahu.
Ayman Odeh
Today, I, too, wish to reaffirm that I intend to continue on the path toward improved relations and friendship with the Jewish people, following the decisive lead given by John Paul II.
Pope Benedict XVI
I’m part Jewish and part Christian, but I’m mostly Jewish.
Joey King
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
Simon Schama
Despite a large body of work in films, TV, theatre and concerts, I am viewed by many as a Jewish artist. I do not resent the label, except for the fact that I disapprove of labels in general.
Theodore Bikel
The signing of the Israel-PLO accord is more than a political milestone. It is a transformative event which touches every Jewish family – physically, emotionally, spiritually.
Shimon Peres
I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people – not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.
Ken Livingstone
If anything betrays my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage – besides the Casper-the-friendly-ghost-like skin tone – it’s my love of fishy fish.
Claire Saffitz
For many years, our Messianic Jewish brothers and sisters have paid a great price. Other Jews have rejected them, and the Christian church would require they walk away from their traditions to fit into the Gentile culture. We must face these past wrongs.
Bill McCartney
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.
Kevin Barry
I get invited to an awful lot of Jewish functions.
Tim Roth
People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor.
Noam Chomsky
Jewish persecution is a historical memory of the present generation and people fear it in the present day, and that’s why those references are so much more powerful. I just understand that better now.
Gregg Easterbrook
I want Israel to be a normal state, part of the international community, part of the free world, but unique in terms of the Jewish people. I want both.
Tzipi Livni
When you have friends that are Muslim, Jewish, gay, from any marginalized group, you realize that they are so much more than this esoteric talking point.
Hasan Minhaj
Silence, this will surprise you not, isn’t really a Jewish concept.
Simon Schama
It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything. That is where the extremist path takes us.
Ariel Sharon
Throughout history, particularly in the last 2,000 years, Jews have been key in adapting local foods to Jewish sensibilities and dietary laws and then spreading them.
Gil Marks
I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn’t fun.
Leonard Susskind
Although I am not Jewish, I have been to many Friday night Shabbats at my friends houses, and I absolutely love it. It’s a great and inspiring tradition to keep the family close.
Yolanda Hadid
I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it’s hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.
Joel Coen
I grew up in a tradition where having ideas and contributing to the community and creating art that had an impact on the world mattered. That’s part of the Jewish tradition.
Eve Ensler
Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.
Daniel Barenboim
The purpose of the Jewish state is to secure the Jewish future. That is why Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, against any threat.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Nothing would do more to improve Israel’s security or its relations with its neighbors than to bring about a sovereign and contiguous Palestinian state alongside a secure, democratic, Jewish Israel.
Denis McDonough
I don’t judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they’re a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.
Diana Ross
Most of the wrestling happens in the South, so I had to ask myself how I was going to be received as a Jewish boy named Goldberg. Then again, I have never, nor would I ever, hide my Jewish identity.
Bill Goldberg
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.
David Steinberg
Holocaust survivors came to Israel in order to establish a new human society where nobody would be able to hurt them just because they’re Jewish. This is both a furious and vulnerable message.
Yair Lapid
There is a school in Israel called Hand in Hand which I support. There Arab and Jewish students study together on a daily basis.
Zubin Mehta
We in the Jewish Home party talk all the time about how Judea and Samaria are our homeland and they are part of Israel, so we are there to stay.
Ayelet Shaked
My family were Conservative Jews. My parents were both born in this country, but my father grew up on the Lower East Side, and my mother was born and raised in Harlem when there was a large Jewish ‘colony’ there. Eventually, they moved to Jersey City to get away from New York.
Norman Lloyd
I think my sense of humor is Jewish. I’m smarter than most white people, which is kind of a Jewish thing, too.
Jim Goad
I come from a very athletic family. But I didn’t have the typical Jewish sports heroes. I mean, like lots of Jewish kids I admired Sandy Koufax. But I didn’t look up to him as the one person who gave me the desire to push on and succeed. My brothers did that for me.
Bill Goldberg
I’m going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.
Michael J. Fox
I think of myself as being Jewish and Irish, despite the fact that I’m English.
Daniel Radcliffe
I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It’s funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I’m not religious at all. I have no religion.
Sarah Silverman
I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn’t stand to be ignored.
James Ellroy
I’m still Elliott Yamin. I’m still the funky white Jewish boy from Richmond, Va.
Elliott Yamin
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.
Matisyahu
I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household. I don’t think I ever had a single discussion with my parents about faith. It was just something gently imposed.
Peter Shaffer
You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she’s still going to expect a passel of grandkids.
Ayelet Waldman
While I am very much Jewish ‘identified,’ I’m not a very religious person.
Jennifer Gilmore
With a successful center-right party such as ours, it is hard for the radical right to find room to operate. This is why they repeatedly attack us in the ugliest manner. They attack us more than they attack the Jewish community or the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ – which they believe exists. I am one of their main targets.
Viktor Orban
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.
David Novak
I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community.
Anita Diament
There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.
Alan Dershowitz
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Toni Morrison
Extol Jewish virtue, modern Zionism and the Israeli Defense Forces.
Geraldo Rivera
I don’t really wake up in the morning and say, ‘Ohmigod, I’m a Palestinian in a Jewish state.’ I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Ohmigod, I have to make sandwiches for my kids.’
Sayed Kashua
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?
Judith Butler
I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose.
Jack Steinberger
It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.
Alan Dershowitz
I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I’d say my religion was more surfing than Judaism – that’s what I spent most of my time doing.
Julian Schnabel
I’m Jewish and my wife isn’t so right now we’re literally decorating a Christmas tree with Jewish stars draped around it.
Max Greenfield
I would never know how good I was if I didn’t have Bob Arum. Bob Arum is white, Jewish; He was working for prosecutor’s office. I’m black, an ex-convict, ex-number runner. Who would be most likely to succeed? It would be Bob 100-1. Yet I beat Bob on everything we ever done, with love.
Don King
I know a lot about Jewish comedians.
Dana Snyder
On July 18, we will mark the 12th anniversary of the senseless loss of 85 lives in the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Tom Lantos
I’m Jewish, so I don’t know much about Easter eggs.
Simon Kinberg
I have one identity, and that’s Israeli and Jewish. I don’t view myself as an American citizen.
Naftali Bennett
I’m lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.
Rashida Jones
I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school… First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don’t know what.
Chantal Akerman
In fact, my New Year’s resolution every year, and I’m Jewish so I get two New Years a year, is to meditate, and I fail every time.
Sheryl Sandberg
I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats – kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.
Elliott Abrams
Look, I play all these tough guys and thugs and strong, complex characters. In real life, I am a cringing, neurotic Jewish mess. Can’t I for once play that on stage?
Jason Isaacs
First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.
Barbara Walters
I’m really an honorary Jew, you know; all the best people are. I really do feel Jewish, even though I’m a Catholic. The way the Church has been behaving, I’m happy to be Jewish.
Nathan Lane
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?’
Jeff Greenfield
I understand if everyone looking at me is seeing a Jew and seeing me as a kind of ‘other.’ But I can’t be expected to see myself that way. That is, to me, Jewish is the normal way to be; it’s not a type of being.
Nathan Englander
Ah, how many luxuries has the good God prepared for his Jewish children.
Sholom Aleichem
The families in positions of great financial power obsessively interbreed with each other. But I’m not talking about one Earth race, Jewish or non-Jewish. I’m talking about a genetic network that operates through all races, this bloodline being a fusion of human and reptilian genes.
David Icke
You know that Moses was spinning like crazy in Exodus XIV through XVII when the Jewish people wanted to go back and become a place again because tramping through the desert was a bit too hard.
Joe Klein
When the Jewish state is established – it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.
Moshe Sharett
Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.
Carroll Quigley
Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people’s problems were worse than ours.
Langston Hughes
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.
Lynn Schusterman
The hijab, or sikh turban, or Jewish skullcap are all explicit symbols, but they do not represent a threat or affront to others, and have no bearing on the competence, skills and intelligence of a person.
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Well, I have been in physical altercations, but they weren’t really fights because I am too scared and Jewish. So anytime that it gets to a point where there is gonna be a fight, I immediately apologize.
Adam Pally
For me the root of evil today is the policy of President Bush. It is a fascist policy. I cannot understand how is it that the Jewish people, who have been the victims of Nazism, can support such a fascist policy. No other people in the world support those policies but Israel! This situation saddens me.
Mikis Theodorakis
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.
Katie Hafner
The United States Jewish population has made many vital contributions in all areas of our society in such ways as helping to develop the cultural, scientific, political and economic life of our country.
Jon Porter
There is a huge opportunity in the intermarriage trend. These are people who, if you show them how vital the community is and how great it is to raise kids Jewish, these people are going to raise their kids Jewish. Ultimately, that’s all that matters.
Tahl Raz
Even a mother – Jewish or not – can’t worry about everything. So it is important that we limit our worries to real as opposed to imaginary risks.
Richard Thaler
The opportunities which the present position open up for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state are so far-reaching as to take one’s breath away.
Moshe Sharett
Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.
Judith Butler
The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don’t really think about it as a regular person.
Liev Schreiber
It’s very clear from Biblical history and Jewish history that Jewish monotheism wasn’t developed in an instant, that it became gradually the accepted norm. But undoubtedly, Jewish ancestors were polytheists.
Robert Winston
I went to Brooklyn College and met this beautiful Jewish girl named Merle, with dark hair, exotic looking and brilliant. So we got married and had three children.
Dominic Chianese
Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.
Tony Judt
St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn’t.
Simon Schama
I am not an anti-Semite! I have a great respect for the Jewish people.
David Icke
I regard Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and all other forms of fundamentalism, as the enemies of God – and I hope you’ll quote me on that.
Arthur Hertzberg
The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel’s existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.
John Podhoretz
Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.
Ariel Sharon
Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.
Georg Solti
I’ve always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert.
Howard Jacobson
My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
Donald Tusk
Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority, and it shields the country from international opprobrium even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.
Ian Lustick
In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
There is no contradiction between the fact that Israel has full personal equality of citizenship but extends national rights only to the Jewish people.
Ayelet Shaked
I’m Jewish, but I’m totally not.
Sarah Silverman
By the reduction of the Arabs on the one hand and Jewish immigration in the transition period on the other, we will ensure an absolute Hebrew majority in a parliamentary regime.
Moshe Sharett
I will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.
Clint Eastwood
As a journalist, I’ve always treaded carefully about being Jewish and caring a lot about Israel and having that not become too big of an issue that could affect my journalism. But I also don’t think it’s essential to my Judaism, as I think it might be for some other people.
David Gregory
Jewish existence in the Land of Israel depends only on the Jews, and on what the Jews think of themselves.
Yair Lapid
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.
David Novak
A Jewish deli should specialize in, first and foremost, Yiddish foods, the foods of the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. So, if it’s a place that specializes in pizza or chicken wings or diner food and then does a corned beef sandwich on the side, it’s not a Jewish delicatessen.
David Sax
My message is that giving is very important. Giving is a Jewish thing, and I like to talk about that. There’s nothing more important, personally, for anybody than being able to give.
Itzhak Perlman
Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn’t an ability to identify with a national heritage – you’ll never hear a Jew say ‘I’m German’ or ‘I’m Polish,’ without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.
Adam Mansbach
I want the State of Israel to remain a Zionist, Jewish and democratic state. There is nothing ‘far’ or ‘ultra’ about those ideals. I also advocate the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
Avigdor Lieberman
I’m Jewish, I can say it. We’re storytellers. We were the moneylenders… Therefore we tell great tales to get what we need. I love Jewish men. They make the best husbands.
Patti Stanger
If you’re criticizing Israel, but you’re doing it in a way that implies that the Jewish people in America have a dual loyalty, that’s anti-Semitism. It’s more than just criticizing Israeli policy.
Dan Crenshaw
A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.
Richard Lamm
I couldn’t lie anymore to my kids telling them that they are equal citizens in the state of Israel. They cannot be equal because in order to fit in and to be accepted and to be a citizen in Israel, you need a Jewish mother.
Sayed Kashua
The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.
Howard Jacobson
Well, I just said that Jesus and I were both Jewish and that neither of us ever had a job, we never had a home, we never married and we traveled around the countryside irritating people.
Kinky Friedman
There are many Palestinians, to be diplomatic, who believe there is no way to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, first of all, and there are a lot of people that believe there is no way to recognize Israel at all.
Reuven Rivlin
Empires came and went while we, the Jewish people, persecuted relentlessly, facing expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust, survived. We survived thanks to the Torah and faith in the Lord.
Eli Yishai
I state in no uncertain terms: An order to uproot an Arab village or a Jewish settlement violates the most basic of human rights… It’s a difficult dilemma.
Naftali Bennett
There’s something innately funny and warm about being Jewish. I think it’s something to be embraced and respected.
Ari Graynor
What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.
Pete Townshend
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.
Ephraim Mirvis
When I was in college, my school newspaper accepted an ad from a Holocaust revisionist organization. This would have been offensive on most college campuses across the country, but I went to a school with a very large Jewish population, so the ad, as you might expect, stirred absolute outrage.
Simon Sinek
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.
Rick Moranis
I think we were raised in a nice Texas Jewish family where education was the most important thing, and close behind that was the arts. It was emphasized and expected that we’d play piano.
Lisa Loeb
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.
Michael Sandel
As a senior in high school with no money working several jobs, I was sent to a wonderful school on the East Coast by a wonderful Jewish man. I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve sent over 5,000 young people to school around the world in memory of him because he was so gracious to me.
Jon Huntsman, Sr.
I don’t think I ever really knew the right words to ‘Hava Nagilah,’ which isn’t great for a Jewish singer.
Idina Menzel
‘Cullum’ is Scottish, but I’m nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry.
Jamie Cullum
Always you find that the more decisive event wins so my father’s sort of annual decisiveness which came upon him on the Day of Atonement every year, he suddenly remembered that he was Jewish.
Janet Suzman
My father, my Rastafari culture, has a tight link to the Jewish culture. We have a strong connection from when I was a young boy and read the Bible, the Old Testament.
Ziggy Marley
Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
Daniel Libeskind
Gribenes have been referred to as Jewish popcorn or kosher pork rinds. It’s basically chicken skin fried in schmaltz. They’re crispy and mixed with fried onions. I’m telling you, when you have it with chopped liver, it’s the most incredible thing because you get this crunch and this surge of chicken flavor.
David Sax
I was born in Russia in 1901 of Jewish parents and came to the United States in 1922 to join my father, who left Russia for the United States before World War I.
Simon Kuznets
There’s two identity markers I’m sure of, and one is, I’m Jewish. And the other is, I’m a writer. There’s just no arguing with either thing. I’m just Jewish.
Ariel Levy
In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line.
Rick Perlstein
I suppose I’m always trying to break down the wall between my characters and myself. I’m trying to make the film as expressive and personal as I can, even if I can’t explain, for example, how important it is for me to be Jewish.
James Gray
The first thing to be said about ‘Prague Winter,’ former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s new book, is that she very wisely chooses to confront early on in it her apparent surprise at learning late in life that she was born Jewish.
Michael Korda
It is not wealth, it is not station, it is not social standing and ambition which can make us worthy of the Jewish name, of the Jewish heritage. To be worthy of them, we must live up to and with them. We must regard ourselves their custodians.
Louis D. Brandeis
I never felt like a good Jew. My mother was not Jewish, and that makes me a non-Jew according to Jewish religious law.
Stephane Hessel
One generation after another is drifting away from anything Jewish.
Ariel Sharon
We have to protect and do our utmost to fortify the walls of Judaism in the land of Israel through legislation that will guard the unique Jewish character of the state of Israel.
Eli Yishai
Watching ‘Girls,’ it was really angering for me at first, because I really had spent decades hiding unlikable, unattractive Jewish girls in likable, attractive, non-Jewish actors and characters.
Jill Soloway
It is as difficult to define or classify Islamic cinema as it would be a Christian, Jewish or Buddhist one.
Tariq Ali
Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.
Mordecai Richler
We are losing the Jewish people in the Diaspora.
Eli Yishai
When knowledge no longer becomes the commodity of the few, but in a sense becomes equalized by everyone having access, you lose some aspect of Jewish particularity, or at least a Jewish particularity that is fundamental to the construct of Jews as people of the book, which was always interesting.
Joshua Cohen
If you think about it, there aren’t that many women who are in their 40s, who are Jewish and funny and stage-worthy.
Amanda Peet
I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.
Alan Dershowitz
All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community’s revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation.
David Novak
Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.
Jonathan Sacks
To think that you can – as a Zionist, Jewish independent state at the end of the 20th century – rule over another people for generations without having any consequences – it’s ridiculous.
Ehud Barak
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.
Robert Fisk
In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.
Karen Armstrong
I am Jewish, Italian, American, Catholic.
Lapo Elkann
My six handbooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events mostly followed the trajectory of my adult Jewish life.
Anita Diament
I mean, people don’t know what race I am. They never know if I’m Hawaiian or Italian or Mexican or Spanish or white. I could play Jewish, I could play anything.
Tyler Posey
I think that peace will require two states, a Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became ‘pro’-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.’ s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.
Norman Finkelstein
I’m this little Canadian Jewish girl, and I’m living my dream.
Emmanuelle Chriqui
When we began working on Parque Pumalin, rumours flew that we were establishing a nuclear waste site for the United States or, oddly for Episcopalians, which we both are, setting up a Jewish state. It would be funny if these theories weren’t being taken very seriously.
Douglas Tompkins
I had a long time admiration for the Jewish people. Especially with their long time of courage, taking so much abuse for so long. I was only seven years old, but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.
Louis Armstrong
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.
Louie Schwartzberg
Pope John Paul II was a man of peace, a friend of the Jewish nation… and worked for the historic reconciliation between the nations and for the renewal of diplomatic ties between Israel and the Vatican at the end of 1993.
Ariel Sharon
I’m sorry I’m not gay or Jewish, so I don’t have a special interest group of journalists that support me.
Vincent Gallo
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
Toni Morrison
My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it’s a very mixed background.
Nouriel Roubini
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.
Anita Diament
Mother humor is such a universal theme. I wrote a show called ’25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.’ I had people coming up to me after the show saying, ‘I’m Baptist, and my mother is just like yours.’
Judy Gold
Many Jews are not Zionists and many non-Jews are. Zionism is a political movement, not a race. To say Zionism is the Jewish people is like saying the Democratic Party is the American people. Jewish people who oppose Zionism, however, have been given a very hard time.
David Icke
The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.
Richard Dawkins
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.
Lynn Schusterman
I’m half Jewish half WASP.
Lena Dunham
I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I’ve taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.
Michael Eisner
I’m still ambiguously ethnic. I could be Persian – I could be anything. But I’m Italian and Jewish, so I’m a citizen of the world; that’s what I prefer.
Justin Baldoni
I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I’m regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I’m on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable.
Tony Judt
The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered… This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us.
Ariel Sharon
The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.
Joshua Cohen
You can find old Jewish newspapers from Detroit that have my promotional ad in them. It was a totally insane time in my life. Paul Rudd was also a bar mitzvah emcee, you know? It was like being a local rock star in Detroit.
James Wolk
The president is the face of the State of Israel around the world: not a representative of a specific ideology but of the collective creativity and history of the Jewish people.
Reuven Rivlin
I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.
Maya Rudolph
The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry’s Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon.
Joshua Cohen
To the rest of us the supreme vindication of the scholar’s view lies in their invincible allegiance to the Jewish heritage – a steadfastness that has been matched only by that of their rescuers.
Henrietta Szold
I’m a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humor.
Peter Eisenman
Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
Arthur Hertzberg
I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I’m your classic American mutt.
Joe Lhota
My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.
Cesar Milstein
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.
Simon Schama
We had a Jewish school; we had a Jewish club. My father was a main donor. My mother was on the committee of the school.
Harry Triguboff
My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.
Alex Borstein
It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.
Eugene Jarecki
As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God’s people – historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant – is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.
Rowan Williams
Growing up near Scarsdale, I should have had at least one Jewish girlfriend. Maybe at some point it’ll happen.
Ato Essandoh
I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family. If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don’t have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that.
Susanne Bier
As my name might suggest, I’m Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn’t be talking now.
Elliot Perlman
As scary as it was being raised by one Jewish mother, I have to feel for my kids because they have two Jewish mothers.
Judy Gold
There are many Palestinians who believe there is no way to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. They call for the right of the return of refugees to Israel – something which is unacceptable for the consensus in Israel and which strikes at the very heart of this issue.
Reuven Rivlin
My story is so boring: Long Island Jewish parents take their daughters to Broadway.
Idina Menzel
I’m a mongrel in the sense that I’m Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south – all these things are mixed in me.
Ariel Dorfman
The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.
Cynthia Ozick
The most that one of Jewish faith can do – and some have gladly done it – is to say that Jesus was the greatest in the long succession of Jewish prophets. None can acknowledge that Jesus was the Messiah without becoming a Christian.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
Jewish skullcaps are obviously not a problem in our country.
Marine Le Pen
If you want to be Jewish, welcome, but convert via the Halacha.
Eli Yishai
Americans are connected to the situation in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel because, generally speaking, Jewish Americans were always there, and many American Jewish people connect their nationality to the Israeli one.
Sayed Kashua
One day before I die, I will finally understand why liberals, especially Jewish liberals, fail to fully support Israel in its right to survive terror attacks.
Mike Gallagher
My mum was raised Jewish, my dad is very scientifically minded, and my school was vaguely Christian. We sang hymns in school. I liked the hymns bit, but apart from that, I can take it or leave it. So I had lots of different influences when I was younger.
Ben Barnes
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
Arthur Hertzberg
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.
Stephane Hessel
When I was little, I went to a Jewish community day school for most of elementary school.
Clara Mamet
I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.
Noam Chomsky
For those who share my view that the Jews as a people have a right to self-determination, Zionism as a national movement of the Jewish people is the embodiment of this very right, which its opponents want to deny.
Angela Merkel
My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point – almost too late, really, but in time – they were all sent overseas by their employer.
Tom Stoppard
Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.
David Novak
There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools… They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding.
Howard Jacobson
In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
David Novak
So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events – pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.
Harold Brodkey
Me, I look in the mirror and all I see is this Jewish kid from Queens.
David Krumholtz
It’s a lie! I am not an anti-Semite. The World Jewish Congress supported me and said that I am not anti-Semitic.
Hugo Chavez
My father was – actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force.
Joshua Bell
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.
Israel Horovitz
Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness.
Billy Graham
My family is Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist and Catholic. I don’t believe in man-made religions.
Whoopi Goldberg
Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they’re always obsessed with one issue – identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?
Etgar Keret
When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people – black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants – to make up America.
Judy Garland
Twenty five percent of Israeli citizens are not even Jewish. Anybody can become an Israeli citizen if you qualify. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship.
Alan Dershowitz
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
Philip Roth
I am very proud of being Jewish. I went to a Jewish school all my life.
Anthony Pratt
My mother was a Jewish General Patton.
Don Rickles
It’s based around a Jewish family but it really is a universal theme about getting along and coming along.
Jami Gertz
I’m confident President Obama will continue his unambiguous commitment to the Jewish state in his second term.
Ed Koch
The Orthodox believe in Jewish literacy, and most of the rest of us couldn’t care less. Rabbis and other creatures have a monopoly on Judaism. This is a turnoff in a world that is increasingly secular and that has turned away from religion. Jews are simply turning away from Judaism.
Michael Steinhardt
The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations – Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others – were natives of Europe and America.
David Ben-Gurion
I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.
Ben Elton
Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things – the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.
Geraldine Brooks
There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It’s bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.
Samantha Power
Let me be clear: I unequivocally support a two-state solution as the path to resolution of the Israel and Palestinian conflict, with Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people. Moreover, I reject the demonization and de-legitimization of Israel represented by the BDS narrative and campaign.
Stacey Abrams
I’ve always enjoyed the communal side of Jewish life.
Thomas Friedman
Our people represent a tapestry of interwoven identities embodying the rich diversity of what it means to be Jewish.
Lynn Schusterman
When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.
James McBride
My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish – she’s the shiksha goddess type – and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.
James Gray
Growing up in a Jewish matriarchal world inside the patriarchal paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah, gave me increased perspective on gender issues, as it also did my gay brother and my lesbian sister. Our younger sister is the perfect Jewish-American wife and mother, and is fiercely proud of that fact.
Roseanne Barr
A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holidays or rituals. So food that may have not been Jewish at one point can become Jewish within the cultural context.
Gil Marks
The fact is, that with the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Arab countries, almost all of whom left behind all their property for which compensation was never paid.
Meir Kahane
Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner’s writings, but I can’t accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.
Daniel Barenboim
Sherrod Brown and President Obama have lost the faith of Jewish Democrats.
Josh Mandel
When Zionism becomes co-extensive with Jewishness, Jewishness is pitted against the diversity that defines democracy, and if I may say so, betrays one of the most important ethical dimensions of the diasporic Jewish tradition: namely, the obligation of co-habitation with those different from ourselves.
Judith Butler
Sometimes people come to my shows and think I’m a Christian artist, and they put their hands up in the air, like they do. But first of all, I’m a Jewish girl from the Valley, and I’m from Los Angeles. It’s funny to be misinterpreted.
Jenny Lewis
Intermarriage is not a calamity but an opportunity for both a Jewish and non-Jewish partner to learn.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
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.
David Cross
My family were finally kicked out of Egypt in 1965 for being Jewish. We managed to remain longer than most.
Andre Aciman
The fact that I am not Jewish by religion does not prevent me from connecting to the Jewish nation’s spirituality.
Amar’e Stoudemire
Miami Beach – that’s where I grew up, in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me, my great-grandmother – a Holocaust survivor, who was my roommate – my grandparents, my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house.
Brett Ratner
I’ve tried to be inclusive in my ‘2B’ series. Over the course of three books, I wrote African-American characters, a paraplegic character, gay and lesbian characters, a bisexual, Jewish heroine, a multiracial hero, Korean and Chinese-American characters, and a multiracial supporting character.
Ann Aguirre
A lot of Jewish kids do identify with us.
Ad-Rock
As a Jew, even if you were not born in Poland, the very name, Poland, gives rise to a shuddering in your body and a longing in your heart. This country was the breeding ground for the soul of the Jewish nation, and unfortunately, also grounds to the largest Jewish cemetery.
Reuven Rivlin
I had a bat mitzvah, was confirmed, went to Jewish summer camp, I go to temple for the High Holy Days. I think, like most people in their early 20s, I kind of strayed away from it. I think once I have a family I’ll be back into it.
Lizzy Caplan
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.
Gregg Easterbrook
The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.
Jerry Leiber
I had a Hebraic wedding in New York, so I’m definitely Jewish.
Amar’e Stoudemire
We have our own values; we build our own special, our JEWISH life – and we are proud, so very proud.
Meir Kahane
I feel very strongly that it is vital for us to constantly keep in mind the fact that the Jewish problem is but a phase of the world problem.
Louis Finkelstein
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
Adam Mansbach
The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.
Simon Schama
Israeli Arabs don’t have to go. But if they stay, they have to take an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish Zionist state.
Avigdor Lieberman
I’ve always been proud of my body, my Jewish nose and all of that. Hollywood’s Hollywood, but that’s not going to change.
Lea Michele
Historically, the National Religious Party, which my party – Jewish Home – is built upon, has aligned itself in consecutive Israeli governments with the ultra-Orthodox factions.
Naftali Bennett
Because we’re Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam.
Anne Frank
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.
Charles Bronfman
I just think of myself as a comedian, really. I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It’s funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I’m not religious at all. I have no religion.
Sarah Silverman
To outsource your memory to machines – which is what many of us do with regard to our use of search engines – seems to me to be fairly antithetical to the basic qualities of Jewish life that have kept the Jews alive for so long.
Joshua Cohen
This American Jewish music is a new experience for us at least consciously.
Neville Marriner
I never thought I’d play an orthodox Jewish man.
Ato Essandoh
I wouldn’t trade anything for family time. To me, it is more important than everything else, and I have a very deep-rooted belief in it, which is influenced by my Jewish faith. That’s a very great source of who I am and what I believe in.
Felicity Kendal
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.
David Novak
Being half Jewish, we grew up with Christmas trees but had Jewish ornaments.
Gina Rodriguez
I’m criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I’ve had my pot shots at them. I’m fair game.
Mordecai Richler
It pains me to see the gap that exists in the public’s consciousness – religious and secular – between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state and as a democratic state.
Reuven Rivlin
Jewish immigration in the 20th century was fueled by the Holocaust, which destroyed most of the European Jewish community. The migration made the United States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world.
Jon Porter
I loved pretending to be a middle-aged Jewish woman. I just wanted to do what I saw Gilda Radner and Carol Burnett doing. But I’m not a particularly good impressionist. It was never my strong suit.
Jenny Slate
I could live on challah bread, the Jewish kosher bread, quite happily.
Dan Aykroyd
I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents.
Danny Meyer
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.
Issa Rae
Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Aaron Ciechanover
At the heart of anti-Semitism lies Moses. He made a catastrophic error, a terrible mistake, and all anti-Semitism for two thousand years stems from his misjudgement. Moses said we Jews could remain a people without having a land. He said we don’t need territory to hold onto our Jewish identity. This was a disaster.
A. B. Yehoshua
I have worked hard to build relationships between Jewish people and black people.
Jesse Jackson
I would like Israel to be a Jewish state, and therefore not to annex over 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to Israel, which will make Israel a bi-national state.
Yitzhak Rabin
Seattle’s not a particularly Jewish city, and I’m not in any way religious. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer.
David Shields
Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don’t say a damn thing about that. You think we’re still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don’t dwell on it.
Monte Irvin
I love being Jewish; I have no problem with it at all. But it did become like a scar, with all these people saying you don’t look it.
Lauren Bacall
I’m 100 percent Irish by birth, grew up Italian, and yet I constantly get cast as playing Jewish.
Heather Matarazzo
People often ask why I remain so optimistic, even in the face of the complex challenges we are facing in the Jewish world, in Israel and beyond. It’s because I am so impressed and inspired by the young people I meet.
Lynn Schusterman
The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state’s Jewish identity. The refugees’ place is not among us, and the initiative to transfer them to Australia is the right and just solution.
Danny Danon
The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.
Langston Hughes
Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family – Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican – and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it.
Laura Esquivel
I was one of two Jewish kids in my school. We were probably one of two Jewish families in our town.
Michael Lynton
I didn’t choose Goldberg because I wanted to be the flagship for the Jewish movement, not by any stretch of the imagination. I chose Goldberg because no one else can own it.
Bill Goldberg
It is essential that Christians understand this: Every Jew – secular, religious, assimilated, left-wing, right-wing – fears being killed because he is Jewish. This is the best-kept secret about Jews, who are widely perceived as inordinately secure and powerful. But it is the only universally held sentiment among Jews.
Dennis Prager
I’m a firm believer in God himself, but that’s as far as I can go. I’m not any denomination. I’m not Catholic or Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist or Jewish or Muslim. I’m none of those things. And I’m sure that’s just fine with God.
Ray Charles
Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.
David Novak
In 1934, the American Jewish charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. We were on the SS Washington, bound for New York, Christmas 1934.
Jack Steinberger
I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we’re short on people. My town has a population of 301.
P. J. O’Rourke
Both Jewish and Roman sources and traditions admit an empty tomb.
Josh McDowell
My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it’s my children’s birthright to be Jewish.
Michael J. Fox
I think the lack of automatically feeling, ‘Yes, the future is going to be like the present’ – that is very much a Jewish thing.
Susanne Bier
My mom’s family is Russian Jewish, and my dad’s Puerto Rico Catholic, so it’s kind of a weird mix.
Ian Gomez
I’m Jewish. Went to a Jewish school.
Jonathan Glazer
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives – our lives – dignity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel does not mean disregarding the rights of others in the land.
Ariel Sharon
A solution of two national states – a Jewish state, Israel; an Arab state, Palestine. The Palestinians are our closest neighbors. I believe they may become our closest friends.
Shimon Peres
There’s a charm, there’s a rhythm, there’s a soul to Jewish humor. When I first saw Richard Pryor perform, I told him, ‘You’re doing a Jewish act.’
Alan King
I’m a member of the American legion and VFW, patron member of the Jewish War Veterans.
Rodney Frelinghuysen
Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of a straitjacket.
Robert Gottlieb
There is a crisis on the Right. It sees the Jewish and democratic state as a democracy for the Jews. This is something I cannot countenance.
Reuven Rivlin
For me, peace should provide security to the Jewish people.
Ariel Sharon
I support Israel. And I have long supported a two-state solution and a democratic and secure state for the Jewish people, with a democratic and viable Palestinian state side-by-side in peace and dignity.
Keith Ellison
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.
Elaine Pagels
The ancient Jewish people gave the world the vision of eternal peace, of universal disarmament, of abolishing the teaching and learning of war.
Menachem Begin
I didn’t want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn’t want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.
Lionel Blue
I love the nation of Israel. I love Jewish people. My King was Jewish, and I embrace that.
Sonny Sandoval
My father’s Jewish, so my world is Jewish whenever I go home.
Ben Feldman
The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.
Vanessa Bayer
And, these Islamic fundamentalists, these radical terrorists, these Middle Eastern monsters are committed to destroying the Jewish nation, driving her into the Mediterranean, conquering the world.
Jerry Falwell
Food is sort of like the Jewish sense of humor, a defense mechanism. It is one of the things that helped the Jews survive through 2,000 years of an often very harsh Diaspora.
Gil Marks
People ask how can a Jewish kid from the Bronx do preppy clothes? Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.
Ralph Lauren
You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.
Tony Judt
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.
Caroline Leavitt
The Jewish community has always taken care of its own.
Lee Whitnum
I just dress like… I’m an old black man. Sorry! Like I’m an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it’s still the ’50s.
Amy Winehouse
If you hate the Jewish people, you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ.
Ted Cruz
People always think I’m Jewish and changed my last name from Rabinowitz.
Nathan Lane
My children receive education that greatly emphasizes the fact they are part of a human group that has tradition, collective memory, and a state. I am a great believer in the need for Israel to be a Jewish state. I certainly believe my children will pass that on to their children.
Yair Lapid
The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
Stefan Zweig
Information-sharing between Western governments about the identities of those who have traveled to Syria and have received militant training is the key to preventing more incidents such as the one at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Peter Bergen
I love having that creative discussion where, at the end of the day, you both feel better for having done it. Maybe it’s a typically Jewish thing, where you sort of go at each other.
Liev Schreiber
I’m Italian and Spanish and Jewish. I’m 100 different things meshed into one. I think that shows girls that uniqueness is beautiful. They can look at me on a magazine cover and see me in a movie and say that they have someone they can relate to.
Lea Michele
I don’t wear pants, or like them; I’m a Jewish woman who’s made the decision to wear skirts, so I wear mostly skirts past the knee.
Mayim Bialik
I’m short, I’m Jewish and I’m a liberal.
Paul Wellstone
A Bar Mitzvah is the time in his life when a Jewish boy realizes he has a better chance of owning a team than playing for one.
Jerry Reinsdorf
I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.
Roald Hoffmann
The Jewish Orthodox community is playing footsie with the alt-right.
Zoey Tur
I am one of the happiest people I know. And that’s a weird place to have arrived at from being a depressed Jewish kid.
Debra Winger
My prayer is that the good news of Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, would flood Jewish communities around the world, that the veil would be lifted, and that we would see a massive turning of Israel to the Lord Jesus.
John Piper
Although I was raised Jewish, my upbringing didn’t include any formal religious education or training.
Melissa Gilbert
I feel very Jewish, and I feel very grateful to be Jewish. But I don’t believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion.
Gene Wilder
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.
Hanna Rosin
I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.
Leon Uris
I was such a Jewish princess. My whole life was leading up to marrying a rich man and living on 48th Street.
Lee Grant
I went to a private Jewish school before high school, and a lot of the kids had beautiful homes, but my parents don’t really care about those kinds of things.
Erin Heatherton
I was born Jewish, and I consider that my religion. But I’ve studied all religions, and as you learn more, you really learn that everyone’s praying to the same God.
Goldie Hawn
People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
Amity Shlaes
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.
Quincy Jones
There is a Jewish tradition of family, too, but then not all Italian or Jewish families are close.
Richard Rogers
I have no religion, but I can’t escape being extremely Jewish ethnically – that is, culturally. In other words, I’m not religious, but I worry and I’m neurotic. And I’m very good with money.
Sarah Silverman
I think somewhere along the way I realized, ‘O.K., no one’s gonna care about a chubby Jewish dude rapping.’ I realized I’d be better behind the scenes.
Benny Blanco
I’m not super, super religious. If this is okay to say, I’m more culturally Jewish.
Abbi Jacobson
I don’t do Jewish stuff because I don’t want people to be left out. If I mention the Torah in Alabama, it’s not going to go down that well. I used to do some Jewish jokes because when I started, I used to play lots of Jewish country clubs.
Rita Rudner
I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.
Daniel Barenboim
Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
Maya Angelou
I’m Jewish, but not overly religious, and have certainly never formally observed the Fourth Commandment, other than via the tradition of wearing white on Friday nights at summer camp, which never seemed to dovetail with the fact that Fridays were also the night for grape juice.
Rachel Sklar
I’m Jewish. I’ve always had a thing where it’s okay to dance with the devil, just don’t become the devil. Even at my peak, I never went too over the top.
Pauly Shore
I’m Jewish; I’m not religious at all, and I wouldn’t pretend to know anything about Catholic politics.
Stephen Frears
I remember as a kid being asked if I was Jewish or Irish. I said, like the glib little 15-year-old I was, ‘You can be both.’ Feeling very pleased with myself. Before they smacked me.
Lenny Abrahamson
I’ve always felt that there’s a Catskills comic who lives in my head and is constantly trying to get out. There’s all these jokes that have been passed down from Jewish generation to Jewish generation, which I love but which I’ve always made fun of.
Andy Kindler
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God’s Book of Life.
Jonathan Sacks
With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
Abraham Maslow
Israel fights back, which is very much at odds with the Jewish instinct to discuss and deconstruct everything until action itself seems senseless.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic, a Jewish fanatic, a secular fanatic, an atheist fanatic, a communist fanatic – all of them are the same. The thinking that, ‘If you don’t think like me, that if you are not with me, then you are against me;’ this is something to condemn.
Marjane Satrapi
I’m half Jewish, half Christian. I’m a Jew for Jesus.
Terrell Suggs
While I’m Jewish, the Hasidic world is still foreign to me. But I do understand some of the ideas of tradition and family and faith of our shared culture.
Ari Graynor
The Nazis hijacked the Jewish thing early on by defining it as ‘the Jewish problem’ and started looking for a solution. These are not just words.
Erik Larson
I’m Jewish and I can sing and I’m alive.
Mandy Patinkin
But there is a difference here: When Jewish children are murdered, Arabs celebrate the deed. The death of an Arab child is no cause for celebration in Israel.
Theodore Bikel
Now, when we say we want peace, what we want is really for our Palestinian neighbours to have a demilitarized state next to us that recognizes the Jewish State. We’re willing to recognize their state, the Palestinian state. But we ask them to recognize the Jewish state.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Presently, the Commission for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History has been brought about to encourage and sponsor a variety of historical activities that advance our understanding of the American Jewish experience as it marks this milestone anniversary.
Jon Porter
We have a very significant number of Jewish citizens, and they have always been safe and secure where they are in Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
I was honoured recently to accept the position of president of Mizrachi U.K. I did so because I believe our eternal challenge as Jews is both straightforward and also awash with complexity: How to sanctify the innovations of the modern world in accordance with our eternal Jewish values?
Ephraim Mirvis
I’m a good Jewish boy from Edison, New Jersey, so I went and saw ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ because you have to: that’s part of your bar mitzvah experience.
David Bryan
Under Hitler it was the entrepreneurial and professional classes who were the first victims of Nazi boycotts and exclusion. Today it is Israel, the most powerful symbol of Jewish national resurgence in two millennia.
Jack Schwartz
I remind everybody that the Sabbath was the Jewish gift to civilization.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
Yom HaShoah is a vital day in the Jewish calendar, providing us with a focal point for our remembrance. We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life and ensure they are not forgotten. We can undertake in our lives to do what they were so cruelly prevented from doing in theirs.
Jonathan Sacks
Zionism demands a publicly recognized and legally secured homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. This platform is unchangeable.
Theodor Herzl
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.
Dani Shapiro
One of the great strengths of the United States is… we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.
Barack Obama
At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I’m Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.
Michael Caine
Passover is the most widely observed of all the Jewish holidays, and the Passover Seder… is the most practiced of all the Jewish rituals.
Gil Marks
A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well.
Henny Youngman
I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene.
Marc Ribot
Nobody in France would ever say ‘He’s a Jewish novelist’ or ‘She’s a black novelist,’ even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a ‘Gay Studies’ section.
Edmund White
Being Jewish has always been important to me. I now have 6M tattooed on the inside of my left arm. It’s only a half-inch, but every time anyone sees it, they’re reminded of the six million who perished, and so am I.
Joan Rivers
I am well placed to know that Le Pen is not an anti-Semite. If one considers his life seriously… a man who went to fight with the Israelis in ’56! Many times, he tried to better the party’s relationship with the Jewish community, even though I do not like the term.
Marine Le Pen
My grandmother was a Jewish juggler: she used to worry about six things at once.
Richard Lewis
In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.
Reza Aslan
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.
Lynn Schusterman
This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you’re a victim, that you’re unwanted and don’t belong.
Tom Reiss
The official Hamas charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of the Jewish state.
Aaron Klein
I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it’s all going to be disastrous. That it hasn’t all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.
Antony Sher
I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.
Norman Lamm
Jewish and Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem are interlaced one with the other.
Reuven Rivlin
I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust – endlessly, it felt like – no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.
Laura Moser
My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren’t Jewish.
Matisyahu
I grew up Jewish, became an atheist and a Marxist, and 28 years ago, at age 26, became a Christian.
Marvin Olasky
I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.
Gyorgy Ligeti
People do think I’m Jewish. But we’re Irish Catholic. My father had a brogue.
Martin Short
Most of the traditional foods we eat on Jewish holidays start out with a seasonal reason as to why we eat them, and later a religious significance is tacked on.
Gil Marks
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you’re not aware of that when you’re a child, the whole tradition is lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor… I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
Adam Mansbach
For as long as the power of America’s diversity is diminished by acts of discrimination and violence against people just because they are black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or gay, we still must overcome.
Ron Kind
Jewish voters are not one homogenous block.
Ken Livingstone
I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn’t have to go very far to pick up their know-how.
Lionel Blue
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.
Hassan Rouhani
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story – as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation – but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.
Simon Schama
Jewish and Palestinian nationalism are virtually contemporaneous, and grew out of the disruptions that created new national movements from the ruins of the old empires / i.
Jack Schwartz
Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish.
Philip Zimbardo
The Jewish journey started in the land of Israel, and it always strove to return there against all odds and all limitations.
Reuven Rivlin
Do you know most of the Jewish songs have the same trend of sadness as Negro spirituals?
Mahalia Jackson
I want to learn about a different religion. I grew up Catholic, but my grandfather was Jewish. Knowledge about other religions can help you understand your own better. I think it’s kind of hypocritical to believe one thing and don’t know about any others.
Mandy Moore
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
Elie Wiesel
I would like to say that the National Front has never been anti-Semitic. Not only am I not anti-Semitic, but I have explained to my Jewish compatriots that the movement that is most able to protect them is the National Front.
Marine Le Pen
In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, ’cause it was lawless. A man’s word had to mean something.
Orson Welles
I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.
Billy Graham
The Jewish people remember the dramatic vote in the U.N. Assembly on November 29, 1947, when representatives of the nations recognized our right to national revival in our historic homeland.
Ariel Sharon
We cannot keep the Jewish state without being a democratic state.
Reuven Rivlin
I really don’t even think of myself as being Jewish except when I’m in Germany.
Peter Eisenman
My husband is Jewish.
Harris Faulkner
My grandmother was a nanny for an Orthodox Jewish family, and she would come home and tell us about that.
Milana Vayntrub
When the Jewish people, after nearly 2,000 years of exile, under relentless persecution, became a nation again on 14 May 1948 the ‘fig tree’ put forth its first leaves. Jesus said that this would indicate that He was ‘at the door,’ ready to return.
Hal Lindsey
Just ten of the Jewish billionaires on this Earth have more than enough to transform the occupied territories into heaven. We can put the ‘pal’ back in Palestinian.
Roseanne Barr
Jewish comedy doesn’t come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn’t come out of nothing… I don’t want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies – and I’m not saying that’s what the Israelis are.
Simon Schama
A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of ‘border,’ and that is what I have experienced.
S. Ansky
People think of Jews as the Woody Allen stereotype, the nebbishy kind of thing, but that’s not the kind of Jews I know. I know plenty of Israelis and plenty of tough guys that are Jewish. So, I think it makes sense that Jews play metal.
Scott Ian
Moses Montefiore loved Jerusalem, lived for Jerusalem, and even made it our family motto. A Zionist before the word was invented, he believed in the sacred idea of Jewish return as a religious Jew’s duty, and in Jewish statehood.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
When you look at food as an ethical issue in the Christian tradition, you don’t find very much about it. You don’t find, as you do in the Jewish or Islamic or Hindu traditions, a lot of restrictions saying you can eat this but you can’t eat that.
Peter Singer
My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad’s union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.
Ezra Koenig
One could establish a system in one state in which Judea and Samaria are jointly held. The Jews would vote for a Jewish parliament and the Palestinians for an Arab parliament, and we would create a system in which life is shared.
Reuven Rivlin
It is an old custom amongst Jewish children, to become war-like on the ‘L’ag Beomer.’ They arm themselves from head to foot with wooden swords, pop-guns and bows and arrows. They take food with them, and go off to wage war.
Sholom Aleichem
I believe that the only alternative Israel has to save itself as a Jewish state – and let’s be frank about that: the Jewish state is predicated on having a Jewish majority – the only way we can do that is by unilaterally withdrawing our border and withdrawing our settlements in the West Bank.
Michael Oren
This first-generation narrative keeps happening over and over and over again, whether it was Irish or Jewish or our community, South Asians, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. We’ve all gone through this sort of bridge, and it will continue to happen.
Hasan Minhaj
I think everybody has the ability to fall in love with a man or with a woman or a white person or a black person or a Jewish person or a Protestant person or whatever.
Ally Sheedy
Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty, and no freedom of speech or press.
Dennis Prager
I don’t think Hank Greenberg thought of himself as the first Jewish baseball player – he was a baseball player who happened to be Jewish. I’m an artist who happens to be Latin.
Jose Feliciano
Jews have been in Egypt since Biblical times, and Alexandria had once been, at least partially, a Jewish city.
Meir Kahane
My grandfather was Catholic; my grandmother, Jewish. Crossing over from Bavaria, as immigrants to the United States, the ship started to sink. My grandmother jumped overboard. My grandfather followed, to save this girl he had never met.
Emanuel Celler
It goes without saying that the Jewish people can have no other goal than Palestine and that, whatever the fate of the proposition may be, our attitude toward the land of our fathers is and shall remain unchangeable.
Theodor Herzl
I don’t think Steve Scalise has a racist bone in his body. Steve and I have worked on issues that benefit poor people, black people, white people, Jewish people. I know his character.
Cedric Richmond
I’m from Cleveland, Ohio, which has one of the largest Jewish populations in a single district in the state of Ohio and almost anyplace else in the United States.
Marcia Fudge
Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger.
Tom Reiss
For a Jewish guy, I’ve recorded a lot of Christmas albums.
Barry Manilow
When I tell people I’m an Italian Jew, they’re very amused by it. But obviously by blood I’m Jewish, because my mother is.
Antonio Sabato, Jr.
I enter negotiations with Chairman Arafat, the leader of the PLO, the representative of the Palestinian people, with the purpose to have coexistence between our two entities, Israel as a Jewish state and Palestinian state, entity, next to us, living in peace.
Yitzhak Rabin
As a matter of fact, part of being Jewish is the whole question of what it is to be a Jew.
Peter Riegert
There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers – only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.
Mary Antin
The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.
Ephraim Mirvis
The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.
Jonathan Sacks
Any adjective you put before the noun ‘writer’ is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it’s feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.
Alice McDermott
The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.
Alan Dershowitz
I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.
Harrison Ford
I represent an emerging group of leaders within the Jewish community who are conservatives; not just fiscal conservatives, but social conservatives as well.
Adam Hasner
I’m an honorary old Jewish lady of the West Village.
John Cameron Mitchell
I grew up in Wakefield, Mass., and there were only a couple of Jewish families in the town.
Israel Horovitz
All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin’s ambassador, seconded by President Truman’s.
Conrad Black
I came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family.
Lenny Abrahamson
Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it’s specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It’s just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We’ve seen that.
Rachel Bloom
I very much favor democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.
Avigdor Lieberman
Do you know, if I go to a Jewish school, them kids are quiet. If I go to a white school, them kids quiet. If I go to a Latino school, they quiet. The only kids that disrespect me is black kids. That’s it – my own are the only ones that disrespect me.
Eric D. Thomas
In the New York metropolitan area, you can find Jews from just about every Jewish cultural community in the world.
Gil Marks
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.
David Ben-Gurion
Here’s the thing: I’m not beautiful. I mean, I’m a perfectly normal-looking Jewish guy. My face has never been my fortune, nor has my body… physical beauty has never been part of my equation. It’s just not on my shopping list.
David Rakoff
I’m rather secular. I’m basically Jewish. But I think I’m Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.
Mel Brooks
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.
W. G. Sebald
Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret – these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.
Tariq Ramadan
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.
Hannah Ware
In the ’80s, we were living in the U.S.S.R., where anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Being a Jewish person in the Soviet Union was not easy. Not that I remember any of that – I was barely old enough to chew back then – but for my parents, both Uzbekistan-born Jews, life was a struggle.
Milana Vayntrub
I’m Italian, but some people think I’m Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way.
Joy Behar
The U.N. did not create Israel. The Jewish state came into being because the tiny Jewish community in what was mandatory Palestine rebelled against foreign imperialist rule. We did not conquer a foreign land.
Yitzhak Shamir
There is no Polish culture without Jewish culture.
Donald Tusk
In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.
Andre Aciman
I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music.
Janis Ian
I was proud to witness American Jewish organizations found the Save Darfur Coalition in June 2004 to mobilize a coordinated interfaith response to the ongoing humanitarian disaster.
Jan Schakowsky
The Arab world needs to appreciate that legitimate historical claims and modern necessities are what make Israel the homeland of the Jewish people.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.
Morris Gleitzman
If you are trying to raise a child to be a Jew, then you have to create a sense of Jewish identity. You really weaken that sense of identity if you celebrate two religions.
Elliott Abrams
I have my own religion. I’m sort of one-quarter Baptist, one-quarter Catholic, one-quarter Jewish.
Tom T. Hall
I had a Jewish grandfather. We managed to hide this fact from the authorities by falsifying documents, my father and I. His father was Jewish, but because my father was an illegitimate child, it was rather easy to pretend that his father was unknown.
Helmut Schmidt
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.
Gwyneth Paltrow
My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin – Binyamin – the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Sumeria 4,000 years ago, and there’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.
Benjamin Netanyahu
For I firmly believe that Jewish life, indeed any communal life, can only be organized according to democratic principles.
Theodore Bikel
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.
Charles Bronfman
People often ask how I can reject the phrase ‘woman writer’ and not reject the phrase ‘Jewish writer’ – a preposterous question. ‘Jewish’ is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and ‘woman’ is a category of anatomy and physiology.
Cynthia Ozick
I am extremely respectful of the Jewish community. You know, I am Christian. I think of Jews as my older brothers. I mean, there wouldn’t be Christianity without the Jewish religion. There is a direct connection between the two of them.
Joe Lhota
What qualified me to write about Israel was that I wanted to; it took no time to convince myself. The only reservation I had was about eaven: I wanted to write about the Jewish heaven but did not feel qualified because I did not and do not believe in ‘it,’ though I should.
Joshua Cohen
I am an unusual Irishman. I’m probably Ireland’s third most famous Jewish son.
Lenny Abrahamson
The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented.
Jack Schwartz
I’ve got the Jewish guilt and the Irish shame and it’s a hell of a job distinguishing which is which.
Kevin Kline
I was joking with my mom that all Jewish mothers now will want their kids to be filmmakers instead of doctors. Because you can make one film, and suddenly you’re directing a ‘Jurassic Park’ movie.
Colin Trevorrow
San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it’s my kind of politics. It’s like being Jewish in front of Jewish people.
Elayne Boosler
I think the best advice I ever got about acting was from my dad, which was, ‘If they don’t buy the fish on the first toss, throw it back in the wagon and go to the second house.’ Which is like an old Jewish fishmongers’ story about how you become a successful fish monger.
Lin Shaye
I am very proud of being Jewish.
Neil Sedaka
My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.
Chantal Akerman
I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.
Simon Schama
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.
Linda Grant
I tell people all of the time that they would make any show in this business – whether it’s black, white, Hispanic, Jewish, Colombian, Dominican – whatever. They’ll make it if it sells. It’s a business. It’s not personal.
Kirk Acevedo
I’m a Jewish born-again Christian.
Stephen Baldwin
Israel and our vicinity is an area that traditionally has little industry. The area is known for history, it’s known for religious stories, it’s known a bit for agriculture, but… neither was the Jewish population thinking about export industry, nor the Arab or Palestinian population.
Stef Wertheimer
You can’t do more mama than Italian Jewish mama.
Ginevra Elkann
Today, there are those who hallucinate that a democratic and Jewish state is only democratic for the Jews.
Reuven Rivlin
I have very distinct memories about growing up as part of what was then a very small Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, IL.
Jami Attenberg
The P.L.O., and later the Palestinian Authority, never truly accepted that Israel, as the national state and homeland of the Jewish people, was here to stay.
Danny Danon
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.
Els Borst
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine
My grandfather was a lot like a white Jewish George Jefferson, and he did not enjoy my work very much.
Jenny Slate
When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.
Max Joseph
The Jewish nation is indeed, the heart of the world and there is no reason for the existence of empires, kings, rulers, masses or systems aside from their reaction to the Jewish people.
Meir Kahane
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I grew up around a lot of Jews. I grew up culturally Jewish, ethnically Jewish, but without real belief and without a strong faith.
David Gregory
I don’t consider myself a Jewish writer.
Ellen Ullman
We do not build new Jewish communities in Samaria, Judea and Gaza. The United States has never accepted our building of communities or of the fence. Yet, I’ve managed to develop relations between Israel and the United States even though President Bush never supported settlements.
Ariel Sharon
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.
Gene Saks
I’d like it if people thought I was Jewish looking.
Natalie Portman
I think it is essential for Israel’s survival as a Jewish and democratic state that we end the status quo. The preferred way to end the status quo would be on the basis of a two-state solution. We don’t want the Palestinians to be citizens of Israel, nor do we want them to be subjects.
Michael Oren
I feel more Jewish than I do Iranian.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
I am deeply concerned that, without peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish and democratic nature of Israel is in danger. That’s why I have opposed Israel’s settlement policy since 1973, and that’s why I have favored a two-state solution since 1967.
Alan Dershowitz
Why do Jewish divorces cost so much? They’re worth it.
Henny Youngman
I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish – a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.
Meghan O’Rourke
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts – understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that’s changing the whole story.
Simon Schama
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.
Lynn Schusterman
By 1961, when I got my first copywriting job, ‘my kind’ were suddenly in demand. The creative revolution had begun. Advertising had turned into a business dominated by young, funny, Jewish copywriters and tough, sometimes violent, Greek and Italian art directors.
Jerry Della Femina
I was too Jewish for ‘Flashdance.’
Jennifer Grey
I think Judas was a very devout religious Jewish person. He realizes that Jews had been persecuted and enslaved for thousands of years, and he wants to keep his people from going through that anymore.
Josh Young
I was raised in an orthodox Jewish home where it was expected that, as a woman, I’d marry an investment banker, raise kids in the suburbs and go to temple. I wasn’t raised to set the world on fire.
Dani Shapiro
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively – I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
Alain de Botton
Black and Jewish leaders have been a coalition of conscience.
Jesse Jackson
My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.
Michael Korda
Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.
Elie Wiesel
As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.
Antony Sher
My dad was Jewish. My mom is not. So I was not raised anything.
Matt Lauer
I as a Muslim want you, as a Christian, to really be a perfect Christian. I want my Jewish friends to be perfect Jews, to live according to the highest principles of what it means to be a Jew, to be a Christian, to be a Muslim.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.
Arthur Hertzberg
Suddenly in high school, I’m in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.
Anna Deavere Smith
I believe the Palestinians have never indicated a willingness to meet our minimum requirements, which are recognition of Israel’s permanence and legitimacy as a Jewish state and end of claims and end of conflict.
Michael Oren
Jewish sovereignty and governance over our ancestral home are, I believe, important goals that every Jew ought to support.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
It was a grave mistake to dismantle the Jewish communities in Sinai.
Ariel Sharon
I think part of being Jewish is that innate desire to question things. Rabbis sit around all day and question the Torah. Giving yourself the room to question things, in a religion, just breeds thinking.
Iliza Shlesinger
The Jewish community is all about love and family, which is the most important thing in my life, too.
Gregg Sulkin
I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches, and I do this voluntarily.
Pete Seeger
Nine times out of ten, people consider a nice little Jewish boy the kid who grows up and sits behind a desk preparing your taxes. I’ve certainly broken that stereotype in many ways.
Bill Goldberg
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of ‘New York Jewish conversational style’. That was my dissertation.
Deborah Tannen
The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.
Benjamin Cohen
I could see myself in some sort of pioneer bonnet, it’s my childhood fantasy, but I think I look too Jewish for the prairie.
Rachel Dratch
I’m into looking at things from the other point of view. And if you look at who votes in the Oscars, mostly older Jewish guys, they’re going to vote for stuff they relate to. Do they relate to NWA? I doubt it.
Michael Pena
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.
Idina Menzel
I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.
Jesse Eisenberg
I have reached a conclusion that when we have to make a choice between greater Israel or a Jewish democratic state – and we have to make this choice, it is inevitable – then my choice is a Jewish democratic country.
Ehud Olmert
I believe that the Jewish state will exist forever.
Ariel Sharon
In 1933, the Nazis came to power and the more systematic persecution of the Jews followed quickly. Laws were enacted which excluded Jewish children from higher education in public schools.
Jack Steinberger
All people who grew up with science fiction and fantasy and horror went through the whole acculturation process of the genre. We were all told to read the golden age writers. We were all told Heinlein and Asimov and all these straight, white males, although some of them were Jewish.
N. K. Jemisin
There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.
Dennis Prager
I could not cherish London and not value Jewish London. The contribution of Jews to London is immense – politically, economically, culturally, intellectually, philanthropically, artistically.
Ken Livingstone
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.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
I’m not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian – I’m just not interested in that argument.
T Bone Burnett
The burden is on the Jewish majority in Israel to prove that the definition of their country as Jewish and democratic is not a contradiction.
Reuven Rivlin
The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important.
Marek Belka
I can’t imagine writing something that didn’t address Jewish themes and questions. It’s such a big part of my life, a lot of the way in which I experience the world.
Molly Antopol
When the Temple was destroyed, the Jewish people faced a crisis unlike any other in its history. For centuries, the sacrificial system had served as the primary medium of atonement before the Almighty.
Meir Soloveichik
I’m Jewish, so it’s like I’m not totally white. I’m, like, gray.
Brett Gelman
I went to this very disorganized Jewish summer camp in Maine called Camp Modin.
David Wain
It’s clear to me that one can’t be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic – all these will not exist without Israel.
Elie Wiesel
I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish – the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn’t go to synagogue. I’m frightened of synagogue to this day.
Howard Jacobson
Hey, I may loathe myself, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m Jewish.
Larry David
I wear the Jewish star, but I’m not – I haven’t converted to Judaism, and I’m not – I’m not – I’m not Jewish in the conventional sense because the Kaballah is a belief system that predates religion and predates Judaism as an organized religion.
Madonna Ciccone
In fact, 37 percent of all United States Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century have been representatives of the Jewish community.
Jon Porter
I eat meat daily. I’m not Jewish. I’m not Arabic. What’s the kind of person that doesn’t eat meat? That’s right – I’m not a vegetarian.
Chuck Berry
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.
Jan Schakowsky
Had my grandparents not emigrated when they did, I might have been born Jewish in Eastern Europe during World War II, or I might not have been born at all. Instead, I was born in 1942 in New York City.
Carole King
I think there’s nothing better in the world than a spirited discussion about the Bible and Jesus and God and the Catholic faith, or the Jewish faith, or the Muslim faith – any religion.
Elizabeth Vargas
You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.
Mary Antin
When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.
Bruce Feiler
The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge’s chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists.
Ernst Zundel
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.
Judith Butler
I must have been yearning for some Jewish content beyond my genetic makeup because soon after my 21st birthday, I noticed I was no longer dating WASPs.
Susan Isaacs
I don’t know much about any of the Hasidim because the men won’t talk to me because I’m a woman, and the women won’t talk to me because, while I am Jewish, I’m not Hasidic.
Jami Attenberg
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.
Noah Feldman
No one will frighten the large and free Jewish community of the United States.
Menachem Begin
I identify myself as what I am. I’m half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.
Francisco Goldman
I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.
Alan Dershowitz
The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation – which speculates upon the labor of people – will always find the means for its existence.
Mikhail Bakunin
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.
Peter Eisenman
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.
Harry Triguboff
My grandmother on my father’s side, a nightclub singer, was a Jewish refugee from Prussia who ended up in Jerusalem, where she met my grandfather – a British army officer. I remember as a child having bowls of chicken soup made by her. There were lots of interesting components, like feet and necks.
Jamie Cullum
I’m comfortable being old… being black… being Jewish.
Billy Crystal
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
Elie Wiesel
Look, the hard-line Jewish position is based, to this day, on the idea that the Palestinian Arabs somehow or other will either accept third-class status, or they will pick up and go away. Now, this isn’t happening.
Arthur Hertzberg
For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.
Ernst Zundel
I want to do everything in my power to ensure the equality between all movements of Judaism in the state of Israel: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. In conversions, in budgets, in the eyes of the law. No one can claim ownership over the Jewish God.
Yair Lapid
Israel needs to change direction, and this is not just political. We’re becoming more closed-in, more isolated, more scared. Those who talk tough are making the State of Israel very weak, very isolated – very Jewish, in the Diaspora-sense, in that ‘everyone is against us.’ We need to get out of this.
Tzipi Livni
I’m not a religious person. My mom was of Jewish blood and my dad was Protestant.
Daniel Radcliffe
There is no question that Israelis – indeed, all concerned Jews – have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel.
David Novak
When we fought for freedom, for the establishment of a Jewish state, we didn’t send a questionnaire to the Jewish nation asking if it wanted a Jewish state.
Yitzhak Shamir
My mom is a white Jewish lady, and my dad is black. The cultures never seemed separate – I had a lot of mixed friends. When I was young, I identified with being Jewish, but I embraced my dad’s side, too.
Daveed Diggs
There was one occasion when I was very young – eight years or seven years old – that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our place.
Shimon Peres
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.
Paul Heyse
There has always been this feeling among the religious public of, ‘Why can’t we all unite?’ Shas, UTJ, Jewish Home… But, of course, the differences between the political parties in practice are too big to bridge.
Eli Yishai
I was raised in a Baptist household, went to a Catholic church, lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and had the biggest crush on the Muslim girls from one neighborhood over.
Will Smith
The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced a lot of holiday music, just not Hanukkah music.
Matisyahu
When kids would say ‘Ching Chong Chinaman,’ I thought they were talking to someone behind me. I used to think I was a white Jewish girl named Rebecca or Rachel.
Lauren Tom
When my children were growing up, we began every family meal – which included breakfast and dinner every day – with a prayer. We are Jewish and so it was the prayer over bread, when we were having bread, or the catch-all prayer for everything when we weren’t.
Ezekiel Emanuel
I was the youngest member of the New York International Brotherhood of Magicians. It was me and a bunch of 60-year-old Jewish men.
Matt McGorry
Dad’s Jewish and Irish, Mom’s German and Scotch. I couldn’t say I was anything. My last name isn’t even Downey. My dad changed his name when he wanted to get into the Army and was underage. My real name is Robert Elias. I feel like I’m still looking for a home in some way.
Robert Downey, Jr.
The Jews would have us believe that God had this bias to this little small tribe in the middle of the Sinai Desert, and all the rest of humanity is just rubbish. I mean, that is the basic doctrine of the Jewish religion, and that’s why it is a most racist religion.
Hamza Yusuf
If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he’d have awesome time-traveling powers. I’d call him Doctorow.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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.
David Novak
Both peoples, both nations, deserve a nation-state of their own. Palestinians, if they wish so, will go to the Palestinian state; Jews, if they so wish, can go to the Jewish state. And we’ll have to have security and demilitarization agreements between us.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Alan King, a comedian I adored, was considered society, and I was considered the Jewish kid from the neighborhood.
Don Rickles
The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France.
Tom Reiss
Since 2002, there has been a wave of attacks against Jewish ‘persons or property’ in France, a great many of them committed by young men living outside Paris, in the vast ghettos called les banlieues.
Tom Reiss
Today, Jewish defense is an accepted thing.
Meir Kahane
Every Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition requires a strict spiritual inventory. You aren’t supposed to just sit around feeling guilty, but to take action in the real world to set things right.
Naomi Wolf
I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter.
Tony Judt
My goal in life was to serve my people, and the most important service for the Jewish people is building the land, and the basics of building the people and the country is working the land.
Shimon Peres
Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one’s own volition.
David Novak
I have Jewish friends. I have Middle Eastern friends. I have Spanish and Italian and British and Scottish and German friends and Austrian friends, and guess what? They all deal with homophobia. It’s an earthling epidemic; it’s not isolated in the black community.
Jussie Smollett
I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families – where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.
Jeffrey Kluger
Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz’s ‘Expresso Bongo’ of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic.
Peter York
