What is unusual about the United States – and it’s something that I have never gotten used to – is that Jews here, there are so many of them, and they are so important to the culture.
Well, I try to not view things through a prism of anti-Semitism, because often, people will use that as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of Jews.
My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they’ve cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.
Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
During most of my life, my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight. I gave little thought to their problems, save in asking myself, from time to time, whether we were showing by our lives due appreciation of the opportunities which this hospitable country affords. My approach to Zionism was through Americanism.
Just as we send young American Jews to Israel through the Birthright program, we need to also consider a ‘reverse Birthright’ for Israeli kids to come see America.
By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth. By encouraging Jews to grow beards, it reminds them that they will not be young forever, that they must prepare the ground for those who come after, just as their fathers did for them.
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.
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.
I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that.
The metaphor of Exodus is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success attracts resentment.
Poles and Jews have been living on this land together for almost 1,000 years. Who can tell how much Jewish blood is in their veins? Nobody knows, so to talk about how to recognize if someone is Jewish is ridiculous.
We respect every religion. Everyone is free to practice his religion freely… In the Tunisian parliament, we have even Jews.
Rabbis throughout the ages, from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook onward, strictly prohibited going up on the Temple Mount. And now there is a minority group of rabbis encouraging Jews to go.
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.
With the Jews, the questions are always open; we’re always questioning. I love that questioning tradition.
My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.
When Jews are sacrificed, you have to ask yourself who will be next.
I was not raised a Zionist, but a socialist, as were most Jews before the Holocaust.
My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.
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.
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.
The Jews must realize that their influence in Germany has disappeared for all time.
I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.
The tension between Jews and Arabs tears us apart.
Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don’t have large minority groups.
When he was not talking about race, David Duke was a very pleasant guy to talk to. He was a very nice conversationalist. He seemed like a regular guy on the phone when the subject wasn’t on race and on Jews and ethnicity.
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
Some friends of Israel believe that the Palestinians will never, in their hearts, accept a Jewish state in Palestine. Yet Germans and French, Chinese and Japanese, Mexicans and Americans have overcome their once insurmountable differences. Palestinians and Jews also have much to gain from peaceful coexistence.
There’s always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.
At age 14, my paternal grandfather fled Poland to escape the pogroms that killed tens of thousands of European Jews. He worked full-time for a cobbler in Boston, making his way to California and eventually starting his own business in Taft – the Goldman Oil Supply Company.
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.
My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.
We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this.
Despite the fact that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are not Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox hold the keys not just to Israel’s Jewish sacred places, but to the life cycle events – conversions, weddings, divorces, burials – of the country’s more than six million Jews.
Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews?
Over the course of history, many Jews have ultimately embraced Christianity – some forcibly, some in order to advance in non-Jewish society, some out of wholehearted belief.
The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.
Jews seek to cleave to the will of God as set forth in the Bible and, particularly, the Pentateuch, with its rabbinic commentaries, the Mishnah and Talmud.
The land which the Society of Jews will have secured by international law must naturally be privately owned.
The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment.
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.
I wanted to write about Jews in Montana, so I went there by plane and bus, only to discover that there are no Jews in Montana. It didn’t deter me.
Just as there are many Jews who keep the Friday ritual in their home despite describing themselves as atheists, I am a ‘tribal Christian,’ happy to attend church services.
Comedy is still alive, and there are still funny people. Jews are still overrepresented in comedy and psychiatry and underrepresented in the priesthood. That immigrant Jewish humor is still with us.
No offense, Nazis, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t like you. I like Jews.
My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-’60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also ‘sold’ ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States.
The Jews’ greatest contribution to history is dissatisfaction! We’re a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.
Jews like to write and sing. In America, a lot of us have been eager to show that we’re part of American culture. But it all goes back to King David writing Psalms.
Our beautiful homeland is enough for us, Arabs and Jews. If we turn her into a battlefield, she will spit us out.
When I started the band, the name ‘Silver Jews’ had no literal meaning – it was just an abstraction.
