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.
There are Jews who were born in Poland before World War II and survived the Holocaust, who think Poland and the Poles deserve an apology.
In the New York metropolitan area, you can find Jews from just about every Jewish cultural community in the world.
The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about.
The last thing Jews need is to create tension with their best friends. And the last thing Christians need is a renewal of Christian hatred toward Jesus’ people.
Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, ‘I can’t stand this’. Then I’d meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I’d think, ‘Hang on’. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject.
I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I’ve never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.
The German mass murder of the Jews… brought my Jewishness to the surface.
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.
At the age of 16 I immigrated to Palestine from Europe, where I became a member of the Haganah, the main underground army of the Jews.
My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values.
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.
All I held against Jews was that so many Jews actually were hypocrites in their claim to be friends of the American black man.
When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.
We’re Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we’d endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
The Bible is the great family chronicle of the Jews.
The Jews have opened fire, and they are unready to begin a war.
Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the sick and elderly, or even protection against violence and abuse.
Eventually, I moved from a place of anger toward the Jews of Israel toward a place of embrace.
I’m of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.
Jews must be able to live with enemies and defend themselves from them. The hatred for Israel has not disappeared.
For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
But the Jews will also be believers, so you can say that all the saints, both gentiles and Jews, will go into the millennial kingdom and populate the earth.
On April 19 1943, the Bermuda conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, in order to discuss saving the Jews of Europe. In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem.
In America and in most of the industrialized world, men are coming to be thought of by feminists in very much the same way that Jews were thought of by early Nazis. The comparison is overwhelmingly scary.
Christians and Jews alike are the new exiles of the contemporary world, struggling with how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centred person. He was really racist and he’d talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even.
For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.
Israel of the coastal plain, where eight out of ten Israeli Jews live far removed from the occupied territories, from the fiery Jerusalem, from the religious and nationalistic conflicts, is unknown to the outside world, almost unknown to itself.
I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis.
The opportunity here in the U.S. is so unique because we are so diverse, with so many different cultures living together. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, all with their own connections to the spiritual aspects of food and with lessons that we can learn from each other.
The common moral praxis of Jews and Christians is most definitely theologically informed by the doctrine we share in common: The human person, male and female, is created in the image of God.
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.
Jews have been in Egypt since Biblical times, and Alexandria had once been, at least partially, a Jewish city.
I am meeting Diaspora Jews all the time, and we are developing programmes to prevent distancing. We have a joint history, but we cannot take matters for granted. Israel is home for all of us, and part of the beauty of the country is its social diversity.
The depth of this conflict, which is more than one hundred years old, requires us to find a way to communicate… so that the residents of the Middle East, Jews and Arabs alike, can live not as if they were forced to live together, but rather destined to live together.
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.
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.
I have always lived in Amsterdam. During the war, we inhabited the Rivieren neighborhood where many Jews lived at the time. Our downstairs neighbors were Jews, and there were also Jews a few houses from us. We saw how they were rounded up and taken away. That made a very great impression on me.
Even as Jews and Christians profoundly disagree about the truth, they are united in the belief that there is a truth to be sought.
Everyone – whether it’s the Jews, the Greeks, the Catholics – everybody is entitled to religious beliefs and entitled to their traditions.
Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
Jews have deep respect for the Queen and the royal family. We say a prayer for them every Sabbath in synagogue. We recite a special blessing on seeing the Queen.
Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.
During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.
If anyone thinks that Jews can steal into the land of their fathers, he is deceiving either himself or others. Nowhere is the coming of Jews so promptly noted as in the historic home of the Jews, for the very reason that it is the historic home.
Jews were asked when life begins. For them it’s when they finally graduate medical school.
Britain has been good to the Jews, and the Jews have been good for Britain.
The Ten Commandments are the most visible symbol because these commandments are recognized by Christians and Jews alike as being the foundation of our system of public morality.
The early years of my life were very, very traumatic. It was scary, because any child knew that death was sort of lurking around Europe as far as Jews were concerned.
The Jews’ fear of assimilation and intermarriage should not replace fear of anti-Semitism.
