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.
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.
There is no Polish culture without Jewish culture.
People always think I’m Jewish and changed my last name from Rabinowitz.
My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.
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.
The state should say that there is place to maintain the Jewish majority even if it violates rights.
I’m Jewish and my wife isn’t so right now we’re literally decorating a Christmas tree with Jewish stars draped around it.
We do not ask Israeli Arabs to share in the Zionist dream. We are asking them to accept that Israel is a Jewish state – the only one in the world.
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.
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.
Jewish voters are not one homogenous block.
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.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
The United States is proud to be the first country to recognize the existence of a Jewish State – just 11 minutes after Israel’s independence was declared.
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.
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.
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?
I’m half Jewish, half Scottish. It’s hard for me to buy anything.
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.
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.
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.
You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I like the way that religion is done there.
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.
What I find fascinating about Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights we celebrate at this time of the year, is the way its story was transformed by time.
I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.
There is a Jewish tradition of family, too, but then not all Italian or Jewish families are close.
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.
It’s so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman’s story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.
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.
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.
I’m Jewish and I can sing and I’m alive.
I’d like it if people thought I was Jewish looking.
I am Jewish, Italian, American, Catholic.
I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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.
I’m not a religious person. My mom was of Jewish blood and my dad was Protestant.
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
We can establish a Jewish and democratic state, but the burden of proof is on us.
My mother’s father was Jewish, so she was very conservative. She liked little, pretty music-orchestral-type things.
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.’
I think the lack of automatically feeling, ‘Yes, the future is going to be like the present’ – that is very much a Jewish thing.
I cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast.
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.
When you have a Jewish mother who has a very strong Jewish family, it’s very ethnic in its practices. Eating brisket, the food and the family and the interconnectedness for better or worse.
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.
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.
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.
The prime minister is not a private individual, but the leader of the Jewish State and the Jewish world as a whole.
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.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews – as well as Blacks and Catholics – were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.
This American Jewish music is a new experience for us at least consciously.
The ancient Jewish people gave the world the vision of eternal peace, of universal disarmament, of abolishing the teaching and learning of war.
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.
My father left me with his love of Jewish studies and cultural life. To this very day, along with several physicians and scientist colleagues, I take regular periodical lessons taught by a Rabbinical scholar on how the Jewish law views moral and ethical problems related to modern medicine and science.
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.
The Jewish people are very diverse, and I believe this rich tapestry of identities and experiences strengthens our community.
