Jewishness Quotes

“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I certainly didn't concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stress-tested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British that one didn't make a big thing out of patriotic allegiance, and was indeed brimful of sarcastic and critical remarks about the old country, but would pull oneself together and say a word or two if it was attacked or criticized in any nasty or stupid manner by anybody else. It's family, in other words, and friends are family to me. I feel rather the same way about being an American, and also about being of partly Jewish descent. To be any one of these things is to be no better than anyone else, but no worse. When confronted by certain enemies, it is increasingly the 'most definitely no worse' half of this unspoken agreement on which I tend to lay the emphasis. (As with Camus’s famous 'neither victim nor executioner,' one hastens to assent but more and more to say 'definitely not victim.')”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Significantly, it was Disraeli who said, "What is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few"—perhaps the most profound insight into the very principle by which the slow and insidious decline of nineteenth-century society into the depth of mob and underworld morality took place. Since he knew this rule, he knew also that Jews would have no better chances anywhere than in circles which pretended to be exclusive and to discriminate against them; for inasmuch as these circles of the few, together with the multitude, thought of Jewishness as a crime, this "crime" could be transformed at any moment into an attractive "vice." Disraeli's display of eroticism, strangeness, mysteriousness, magic, and power drawn from secret sources, was aimed correctly at this disposition in society.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.”
― Rachel Corrie

“As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Judaism teaches us the sentence, “The Lord is One,” is not exclusive to Adonai, but rather inclusive of everything, everything, everything! Did you get that? Everything is One. This means far more than the teaching we are all connected. That teaching could be speaking biologically, or even atomically. I am talking about more than even the microscopic connection we all share. More than our DNA.”
― Laura Weakley, What The Torah Teaches Us About Life / Through The Themes Of The Weekly Torah Portions

“When God hears us worshipping Him, that alone makes Him feel worthwhile to be God!”
― Raphael Ben Levi, Romance of the Hebrew Calendar

“I do not like the darkness, but please don’t make the light too strong.”
― Raphael Ben Levi, Romance of the Hebrew Calendar

“I feel myself alien from everyone; that is my kind of Jewishness.”
― Frederic Raphael

“It was was very important not to cast any pearls before swine -- especially when one of the swine was trying to keep kosher.”
― Jaffe Cohen, The King of Kings and I: The Greatest Story Ever Kvetched!

“And yet I feel an uncanny kinship to Moses as the Rabbis imagine him in that story, as I suppose that the Rabbis intended I should. Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so. And why I feel drawn towards it even now and, in the face of everything, find myself oddly determined to carry my own flawed version away from the slope of Sinai where, according to tradition, my soul stood at the time of the original revelation.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“So," Art [Green] said, "it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms.”
― Rodger Kamenetz, Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters

“«No adoptes esa idea errónea de que todo extranjero, porque exhibe su diferencia, es incapaz de ser solidario»”
― Edmond Jabès, Un extranjero con, bajo el brazo, un libro de pequeño formato

“De ce crezi că nu-i iubim pe evrei? Pentru că, în orice împrejurare, ei sînt evrei. Uite, cîte unul parcă nici n-ar fi, te obișnuiești cu el și apoi, dintr-o dată, e evreu și încă cum! E vorba de apartenența care nu ne place la ei, tocmai pentru că noi înșine nu o avem.”
― Andrei Bitov

“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

“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

“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

“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