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.
Most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel.
I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.
An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!
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.
Honestly, the dangerous situation in which Jews in France live is such that those who walk with a kippa are in any case a minority, because they are afraid.
Because I was suspicious of the traditional Christian church, I tended to tar them all with the same brush. That was a mistake, because there are righteous people working in a whole rainbow of belief systems – from Hasidic Jews to right-wing Bible Belters to charismatic Catholics.
Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights.
Some of us shorten our names or our noses or both… We Jews can be extremely neurotic and are inclined to become easily depressed. Most Jews seldom say, ‘Have a nice day’ or even have one. To be honest, I’ve never heard a Jew say that. We’re just not that optimistic. Life is neither a bed of roses nor a bowl of cherries.
All in all, we Muslims have only two holidays, and they’re always getting moved around from season to season, from month to month, because we’re dependent on the moon and not the sun, and unlike the Jews, we haven’t created a leap year, so we have no Adar Bet.
Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left.
In the past, we saw European leaders speaking against the Jews. Now, we see them speaking against Israel. It is the same anti-Semitism of blood libels, spreading lies, distorting reality and brainwashing people into hating Israel and the Jews.
As a child, I personally didn’t really get to know any Jews. I was eight years old when the Night of Broken Glass happened. And Ludwigshafen was purely a workers’ city, so we didn’t have a very big Jewish community. What I did know about the Jews, I heard from my mother. My mother was very much pro-Jewish.
Midwestern Jews is a different community, is a different thing than New York Jews, L.A. Jews. It’s just different. It’s the whole Midwestern thing.
We in the Joint List are living proof that Arabs and Jews refuse to be enemies.
Moses freed the Jews. Lincoln freed the slaves. I freed the neurotics.
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.
If Christians see Mormonism as a dramatic deviation from a millennia-old, biblically-based faith, Jews see Christianity in the same light.
The thirst for liberation and equality can never come at the expense of dehumanizing other marginalized groups – especially at a time when hate crimes against Jews have increased significantly.
It is uncomfortable to be reminded that the Catholic church only removed the reference to ‘perfidious Jews’ from the Good Friday liturgy in 1960.
My family is from Russia and Poland. We never had that thing with the German Jews.
Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn’t quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.
You can easily see why the experience of Jews would be helpful if you’re looking to get action on religious persecution.
If Jews don’t come to Nazareth, Arabs don’t go to Afula. There is fear on both sides.
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.
I think a lot of Jews make Israel the centerpiece of their Judaism. It becomes the centerpiece of their Jewish existence and of their faith. I have always felt that that’s not for me.
One area where American Jews have something to teach Israel is religious pluralism, something that living in a democracy with a separation between church and state has helped us fine-tune.
In the late ’80s, the U.S.S.R. loosened its restrictions on immigration. When the government was like, ‘Y’all wanna bounce?’ my family, along with tens of thousands of other Jews ran for the door in an attempt to make a better life in America.
When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.
Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.
Israel is not the safest place in the world for Jews. Melbourne in Australia is better. Teaneck, New Jersey, is safer.
If there’s no future for Jews in Europe, there’s no future for Europe.
Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
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.
When comics came along in the 1930s there was a talent pool waiting. And one reason is so many areas were closed to Jews. Colleges, advertising agencies, many of the corporations – the doors that were closed led to the one that was open.
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.
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.
Well, I play Jews and parrots. Parrots are how I’ve branched out.
What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.
One must remember that the Jews have one, tiny country, the only place they have the right and capability to defend themselves by themselves. And it is our duty and my responsibility to see that we will never compromise about that.
I do believe that Muslims and Christians and Jews pray to the same God. And yet they understand who God is in significantly different ways.
There are a lot of Arabs that are not Muslims. They are Christians; they are Jews. Muslim Arabs, especially in my family, are just so ecstatic that I get to play Jesus. They’re so proud.
Wilberforce, because of his faith, stood up for African slaves. Bonhoeffer, because of his faith, stood up for Jews. That’s Christianity to me.
In today’s U.S., it’s possible for almost anyone – women, gays, African-Americans, Jews – to run for, and be elected to, high office.
I see all this and know that if we are to save the Jewish state and its three-and-a-half million Jews from terrible horrors, we must rise up and demand a fundamental change in the very system of government.
Jews bear children not only because the carnal election of Abraham must continue. For Jews, raising children is essential to living a rounded ethical life.
Among them, there were Muslims, Christians, and Jews living together. But then violent organizations came, bringing with them many large groups of people from various parts of the world to Palestine.
America is totally under control of the Jews, you know. I mean, look what they’re doing in Yugoslavia.
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.
With the Kick It Out campaign, I was interested in asking: ‘Why is antisemitism a lesser racism than other racisms?’ I genuinely believe that to be the case – that negative stuff said against Jews isn’t considered that important.
