I’m rather secular. I’m basically Jewish. But I think I’m Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.
I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals ‘klezmer’ and expand it to, ‘Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.’
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think I have accomplished what I still have to accomplish. There is one thing that I would like to do, and that’s to bring security and peace to the Jewish people.
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.
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.
Beyond being Jewish, I’ve always found myself to be very much in tune with spirituality.
If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly.
I’m always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.
We established Israel as a Jewish country. I want to provide an Israel that is a Jewish, Zionist country.
I have one identity, and that’s Israeli and Jewish. I don’t view myself as an American citizen.
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.
But, when I toil in the field of Jewish culture which I frequently do, I am indeed a Jewish artist.
I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community.
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.
Extol Jewish virtue, modern Zionism and the Israeli Defense Forces.
What moves me is neither ethnocentric pride nor sectarian arrogance. I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures. But it is mine.
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.
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.
The Jewish community has always taken care of its own.
I very much favor democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.
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.
When Jewish youths walk down the street and demand the death of Arabs simply because they’re Arabs, then I’ve lost my own small battle.
My own electorate, which I represented for 36 years as an anti-apartheid politician, had a considerable number of Jewish voters supporting me throughout my career.
One generation after another is drifting away from anything Jewish.
I love the nation of Israel. I love Jewish people. My King was Jewish, and I embrace that.
I’m this little Canadian Jewish girl, and I’m living my dream.
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.
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.
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.
I am not an anti-Semite! I have a great respect for the Jewish people.
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.
If you hate the Jewish people, you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ.
As a first generation Jewish American, I have witnessed firsthand Jewish immigrants who have come to this Nation in order to create a better life for themselves, their families, and future generations.
I’m not super, super religious. If this is okay to say, I’m more culturally Jewish.
I think the people of America just need to listen more to the ministers and MKs from Jewish Home.
My grandmother was a nanny for an Orthodox Jewish family, and she would come home and tell us about that.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
My grandmother was a Jewish juggler: she used to worry about six things at once.
Do you know most of the Jewish songs have the same trend of sadness as Negro spirituals?
I’m a member of the American legion and VFW, patron member of the Jewish War Veterans.
The majesty of the American Jewish experience is in its success marrying its unique Jewish identity with the larger, liberal values of the United States. There is no need anymore to choose between assimilation and separation. We are accepted as equals.
I’m half Puerto Rican and half Jewish and so, in some ways, living in many worlds at once is where I feel most at home.
I’m confident President Obama will continue his unambiguous commitment to the Jewish state in his second term.
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.
I’m Jewish, not Catholic, but I’m a spiritual person.
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.
My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don’t have one identity. I’m Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish.
I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there’s this conflation of race, culture and religion.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve never dated a Jewish woman.
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.
That room was not available, and the only other room had been booked for a Jewish bar mitzvah. I called the father and told him I needed the room and I would pay him to move the bar mitzvah to an adjoining room which was smaller.
We have some Jewish members of Congress, not a lot but there’s a bunch of us.
Only if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole.
I want to remind people that the Nazis weren’t able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn’t have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.
I’m 100 percent Irish by birth, grew up Italian, and yet I constantly get cast as playing Jewish.
My dad’s Jewish and my mum is Christian, so I grew up with no religion. Just whatever religion I wanted.
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.
