In these difficult times, the feeling of solidarity with my Jewish co-religionists is doubly gratifying and comforting in view of the deprivation of rights with which German Jews are now forced to live.
The notion of someone who is fitting in or trying to become part of a larger family… It’s hard to separate that from my own Jewish roots.
It is an old custom amongst Jewish children, to become war-like on the ‘L’ag Beomer.’ They arm themselves from head to foot with wooden swords, pop-guns and bows and arrows. They take food with them, and go off to wage war.
When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.
Today, Jewish defense is an accepted thing.
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.
We played a gig and we had a song that was offensive to people of the Jewish persuasion, and we led off with it, and they were offended by it, and that was that.
If you are trying to raise a child to be a Jew, then you have to create a sense of Jewish identity. You really weaken that sense of identity if you celebrate two religions.
Stanley Hauerwas is correct that Judaism insists on the bearing of children because it is essential to Jewish continuity. But to end the matter there is to miss an essential point: if we are to learn to love others, Judaism says, we must begin by loving those who are closest to us.
My goal in life was to serve my people, and the most important service for the Jewish people is building the land, and the basics of building the people and the country is working the land.
Look, the hard-line Jewish position is based, to this day, on the idea that the Palestinian Arabs somehow or other will either accept third-class status, or they will pick up and go away. Now, this isn’t happening.
The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.
I’ll tell you that when an innocent person is killed, we never go about asking or inquiring whether they were Jewish or Christian or Muslim. That’s not our way or creed.
When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.
Nobody cares if you’re black, white, straight, gay, Christian, Jewish, whatever it may be. When you step on that field, you’re a member, in my case, the 49ers. That’s your job, your occupation.
There are very close ties between the Jewish and Mormon people.
Jewish skullcaps are obviously not a problem in our country.
Abraham was extremely wealthy and he had a covenant with God. It’s not the Jewish blessing, it’s the Abrahamic blessing. I get excited talking about it ’cause I love it and I started out deep in debt with nothing. I had to learn this from the Bible and from my spiritual mentor Oral Roberts.
Sometimes people who are Jewish are held to a higher standard which sometimes we take great pride in.
I remember once doing a benefit for a Jewish charity and wearing an enormous cross. I kind of don’t let the audience dictate anything to me. I sort of dictate to them, and they better be on board.
Since the turn of the 20th century, members of the Jewish community in Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia have been meeting together to celebrate and worship.
Emerging from embattled and humble beginnings, the Jewish state has exceeded all expectations for its success and prosperity.
At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
I knew that as a pharmacy student I would obtain military deferment. As I was of Jewish origin, this meant that I would not have to serve in a forced labor unit of the Hungarian army.
I’m half Jewish, I’m half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It’s like, What is he doing?
I’m a good Jewish boy from Edison, New Jersey, so I went and saw ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ because you have to: that’s part of your bar mitzvah experience.
Maybe there’s something about the outsiderness of being Jewish that makes for a fiery feminist type.
In the ’80s, we were living in the U.S.S.R., where anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Being a Jewish person in the Soviet Union was not easy. Not that I remember any of that – I was barely old enough to chew back then – but for my parents, both Uzbekistan-born Jews, life was a struggle.
Both Jewish and Roman sources and traditions admit an empty tomb.
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn’t exist.
Passover is the most widely observed of all the Jewish holidays, and the Passover Seder… is the most practiced of all the Jewish rituals.
There’s never really been a tradition of making films about Jewish themes or using Judaism as a constant.
Open a Jewish daily prayer book used in any part of the world, and Zionism will leap out at you.
I try to put my heart out there to everybody. They don’t have to be Christian. For example, I have lots of Jewish readers. I love my Jewish readers.
The signing of the Israel-PLO accord is more than a political milestone. It is a transformative event which touches every Jewish family – physically, emotionally, spiritually.
What should be the future of Israel? Is the land the most important choice, and for that reason to keep the whole of the land at any cost, or to have a partition and build the Jewish state on part of the land? And the other part?
If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he’d have awesome time-traveling powers. I’d call him Doctorow.
My six handbooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events mostly followed the trajectory of my adult Jewish life.
Not only were the Jewish people beloved, but God himself had taken pains to let them know it. Could there be any clearer sign that he continued to believe in their potential, even without the Temple, to achieve forgiveness and ultimately merit the Temple’s rebuilding?
We had a Jewish school; we had a Jewish club. My father was a main donor. My mother was on the committee of the school.
I will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.
Creating a meal for my friends and family, sitting together, eating, laughing and talking – that is when I am so happy. Oh my God, if you could see how much food I make – I am the original Jewish mother.
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives – our lives – dignity.
Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.
My first agent told me to change my name or I’d only play Jewish parts or Indians. Of course I refused to change it. Shortly thereafter she came up to me and told me I had to keep it, because her numerologist said it was very, very good.
The concept of God in Jewish orthodoxy is one where you’re having constant quarrels with God. Where I come from, in Islam, the only concept of God is you submit to Him and you obey His commands; no quarreling allowed.
I’m Jewish and respect the traditions of Judaism, but through all the time I’ve spent photographing nature, I also have a deep appreciation for the power of the universe. No, not the power of the universe, but just celebrating life.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.
There is no contradiction between the fact that Israel has full personal equality of citizenship but extends national rights only to the Jewish people.
Jerusalem is the holiest place for the Jewish people.
I came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family.
I’m certainly not a practicing Jew. I would never claim, ‘I’m Jewish.’ That’s not the first and foremost thing in my mind, as far as who I am as a person.
The opportunities which the present position open up for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state are so far-reaching as to take one’s breath away.
We in the Jewish community must ask ourselves what role we are going to play in changing policies and practices that discriminate against LGBT Americans. We have a special responsibility and civic duty to ensure that all Americans are treated with dignity and equality.
Moses Montefiore loved Jerusalem, lived for Jerusalem, and even made it our family motto. A Zionist before the word was invented, he believed in the sacred idea of Jewish return as a religious Jew’s duty, and in Jewish statehood.
