Jewish History Quotes

“If you had a secret - one that could destroy your life if shared, what would you do to protect it?”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“Appeasement as a policy soon failed. The powerful Babylonian empire, desiring the vast treasures stored in Jerusalem’s Temple, conquered the Holy Land in 586 BCE—razing the building to its foundations. The once glorious city of Jerusalem lay in ruins, a physical embodiment of a spiritual collapse. The Babylonians seized not only the Temple’s material wealth but also carted off its human capital, taking the Israelites’ priests, scholars, and skilled elite back to the court in Babylon—where the exiles wept by its rivers.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“Solomon, for his part, continues his father’s prophetic legacy by composing the Song of Songs, a beautiful meditation on love and devotion that celebrates God’s greatest gift to humanity.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“From the lowest depths of his jail cell, Joseph identifies himself for the first time with forefathers, reconnecting to his heritage despite being cut off from his family for years. Despite living in a foreign land alone amidst a foreign people, Joseph declares that he has remained true to his people’s core values. One of those values is gratitude, and for the first time Joseph acknowledges that his talents are God-given rather than earned. He has ended up in prison because of unwavering gratitude to a human master who selflessly cared for him, a devotion that mirrors his gratitude to the Divine Master. In this terrible low moment, Joseph sounds fulfilled for the first time in his life, as the principled decision to accept imprisonment provides an uplifting sense of purpose. With renewed appreciation for God’s care, Joseph challenges his fellow inmates to reject backstabbing pagan deities whose flaring egos drive them to relentlessly pursue self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. As humans naturally emulate the characteristics of their deities, Joseph prefers an ethical and compassionate Divine Mentor.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“between the raindrops" - a Hebrew expression for evading repeated disaster.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“There’s no clearer definition of war than the sight of barbed wired fences surrounding dark fields muddied by the sky’s tears.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“Whenever you feel like the world is against you, start counting your breaths. One breath every five seconds will show anyone who is watching that you haven’t a worry in the world.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“The empty seats belong to the other Jewish kids who were in my class. I’m the only one left.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“You’re right to fight for everything you believe in, and I’ll do “the same, but only until it is too dangerous. I won’t risk our lives for a fight we won’t win.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a geto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.”
― Daniel Silva

“One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Hanukkah's miracle isn't about the oil lasting 8 days, rather it's about the resilience of light amidst darkness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was

“The echo of his name found a soft landing in the rustle of banana leaves, like it always did.”
― Sarah Dayan Mueller, Home in a Hundred Places

“Hanukkah Sonnet

Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah, let's light the menorah,
Let's wipe out all divide, even if some call it utopia.
Come one, come all, no matter the culture,
Let's stuff some latkes while we dreidel together.
Worry not about the candles burning low,
Fear not the darkness of hate and narrowness.
So long as we stand as bridges and not walls,
No darkness is match for our uplifting radiance.
The light of the festival doesn't come from candles,
The sweetness in the air doesn't come from treats.
The light and sweetness of these joyful festivities,
Rise from the loving streams of our heartbeats.
Let us burn bright as the gentle epitome of ahava.
Let us live life as a walking and talking menorah.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“Mira thought she had come home to her countrymen and to her remaining family, but in fact, she had come home to a country torn apart by civil war and into a city about to become the center of the most devastating war the Jews had ever known.”
― Betsie A. Gebbia, The Work of Thy Hand A Novel of Early Christianity

“Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah, let's light the menorah, let's wipe out all divide, even if some call it utopia. Come one, come all, no matter the culture, let's stuff some latkes while we dreidel together.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“Let us burn bright as the gentle epitome of ahava. Let us live life as a walking and talking menorah.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“Israel is the only place in the world with a Jewish majority. Some believe this is important to give a voice in the global and political sphere to a whole group of people who have historically been persecuted. For some, it comes down to safety.”
― Haley Neil, Once More with Chutzpah

“On the one hand, I don’t know a single person who says, “Yay! Purim is my favorite holiday!”

On the other hand, if there’s any holiday concept more Jewish than “Here’s the awful story of what happened to your great-great-grandmother. Have a cookie.” I don’t know what it is.”
― Arinn Dembo

“Ken sos tu? I am Rebecca (Rivka, Rebekah) from my mother’s mother and the wife of Isaac in the Bible. The name means “to tie firmly” or “to snare,” which is why—or so her mother used to tell her when she struggled at sewing—she could, with practice, become skilled with a needle and thread. I am Camayor, from my mother’s father, Behor Camayor of blessed memory, and also Cohen, high priests descended from the sons of Aaron, a name
she feels she must live up to, though she’ll hide it as needed and may God forgive her. I am from the pomegranate tree my father planted at my birth, from my nuns in white habits, my staircase
with the worn ninth tread, the candlelight reflected in my fingernails. I am a gypsy girl, because to have no home place had once seemed romantic and she could do the dance, just as she could climb ropes at gymnastics, rising and lowering at will. Or was it actually that home, back then, was everywhere?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“You are either anti-semite or sapiens, you cannot be both.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“The light of the festival doesn't come from candles,
The sweetness in the air doesn't come from treats.
The light and sweetness of these joyful festivities,
Rise from the loving streams of our heartbeats.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“You know why most menorahs nowadays have nine branches even though Hanukkah lasts eight days! It is to hold the ninth candle that sacrifices itself to light up the lives of those lamenting in darkness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“First, you find out that you can lie straight faced to get out of some forced march or run or something. Then, you find out that you can steal, as long as it's not from your own platoon. Finally, you end up like Jinji, wearing dead man's boots and not thinking too much about it."
Dead Man's Boots”
― Oren Shafir, Small Truths and Other Lies -ebook

“And yet to reach for examples from the Holocaust, or the Jewish diaspora, has become a natural reflex when the question of ethnic or religious minorities comes up. It is a moral yardstick, yet at the same time an evasion. To be reminded of past crimes, of negligence or complicity, is never a bad thing. But it can confuse the issues at hand, or worse, bring all discussion to a halt by tarring opponents with the brush of mass murder.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

“Today, our religious foundations boil down to the future imagination of a coming saviour. This is enough to demonstrate how weak we have become on all planes.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Unless being a Jew is of absolute significance how can we justify the ultimate price which our people was often forced to pay throughout its history?”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

“Jewish self-image and its historiographic reflection were transformed by the destruction of the state and temple and the exile of the Jewish people. But continuity was preserved in language and scripture, memory and commemoration. The rabbis were not only the supplanters but also the heirs and custodians of the old tradition from which they claimed to derive their own legitimacy. The situation in Persia and in other Middle Eastern countries was radically different. Here the conquest and conversion of these peoples to Islam brought radical change and, above all, discontinuity. Muslim conquest brought a new religion and the consequent changes were far greater than, for example, in Christendom. Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire, but it did so by conversion, not by conquest, and it preserved the Roman state and the Roman law and learned to live with the Latin and Greek heritage. Islam created its own state, the Caliphate, and brought its own language, Arabic, and its own scripture, the Qur’an. The old states were destroyed. The old languages and even the old scripts were forgotten. The rupture was not as complete as was once thought, or as Muslims claimed, and much pre-Islamic custom survived under an Islamic veneer. [...] There was no usable past from a Muslim point of view—hence the Muslim neglect both of history and of epic, with only minor exceptions. There was thus complete discontinuity in the self-image, the corporate sense of identity, and the collective memory of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East.”
― Bernard Lewis, Historians of the Middle East

“Who are you and who am I to set ourselves up as judges of an ancient people, and furthermore our own?”

“Who are you and who am I not to help an ancient people, and furthermore our own, refrain from serious error? Their salvation may depend on it, and ours certainly does!”
― Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten

“In the American Jewish collective consciousness, the Holocaust has functioned as the historical glue of the postwar synthesis. The Holocaust illuminated America’s exceptional goodness by contrast to European barbarism and by virtue of America’s defeat of the Nazis. It confirmed the absolute necessity of Israel as existential insurance policy. It reinforced the necessity of the open, liberal society for Jewish flourishing. Holocaust memory concretized a shared sense of victimhood, a sensitivity to the historically precarious nature of Jewish survival, and a filial duty that, for many American Jews, is often the primary reason they give for their continued Jewish identification. But this is a role the Holocaust can fulfill for only so long. While creative opportunists continue feverishly to mine the event for content, this is just another indication that the Holocaust is leaving the realm of present memory, transforming, like the Spanish Inquisition, into a matter of the distant Jewish past.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life