Jewish Identity Quotes

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number. ~ Jean Amery

It took me many years to understand that my identity is more Israeli than Jewish. ~ Mili Avital

I hadn't known up to that moment that I had a surname that was recognizably Jewish, or that people named Marx would be unwelcome somewhere in the United States because of it. ~ Elinor Lipman

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. ~ Elliott Abrams

Oskar pushes away the blanket. Lies looking down at his naked body. His naked body that will give the lie to any false identity papers he manages to procure. Has anyone, he wonders, ever explained to me the significance of circumcision? Why I have had to sacrifice to God a piece of my sexual organ. ~ Glenn Haybittle

I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us. ~ Ralph Webster

My experience as a Jewish American has often been as a spectator of one-sided conversations, or more like monologues, about Israel, Jewish History, Jewish identity, etc. Although there are profound divisions amongst Jews on all of these topics there are not many opportunities for deep and thoughtful dialogue about them. ~ Jill Soloway

There are times when folks will point out certain characteristics I have, like me being an interruptor, and attribute them to my Jewish identity. ~ Jill Soloway

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. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

The way I see it, religion, has done our family more harm than good. For me, faith has never been a source of comfort... For herself, Mela always missed having that sense of identity. She had a longing to belong... Long ago, we found that compromise. ~ Ralph Webster

On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and - over the years - have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego. ~ Walter Kohn

When Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours. ~ Maurice Samuel

Did I know that the reason Hitler had been able to slaughter six million Jews without too much complaint from the world was that for two thousand years the world had been taught that Jews, not Romans, had killed that man? ~ Chaim Potok

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory. ~ Richard P. Feynman

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are. ~ Norman Mailer

In Judaism praying for benefits is a very small part of the liturgy. Most of it is commitment of one's fortunes to God, and meditation on sacred writings which put in clear words the few great points of our religion. Its daily aim is a renewal of religious energy through an act which declares one's Jewish identity and one's hope in the Lord. ~ Herman Wouk

Religion is for those who are without the pure knowledge of the Almighty true God- Jehovah the Creator of the Heavens and the earth..it is also for those who are ignorant of the fact of who God is and are neither founded in Him nor allign themselves to His righteous standards...but are lovers of sins and every acts and pleasures that does not glorify Him. Christianity is not a religion and will never be. It is a relationship consisting of our being in unity with Jesus Christ and with others...tuned and under the banner of Christ-likeness, upholding justice and righteousness. ~ Taitusi Williams Savou

The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state's Jewish identity. The refugees' place is not among us, and the initiative to transfer them to Australia is the right and just solution. ~ Danny Danon

In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Every type of social setting produces its own visions of the dangers that threaten its identity, visions made to the measure of the kind of social order it struggles to achieve or to retain. If the self-definition, simultaneously descriptive and postulative, can be thought of as a photographic replica of the setting, visions of threats tend to be the negatives of those photographs. Or, to put this in psychoanalytical terms, threats are projections of society's own inner ambivalence, about its own ways and means, about the fashion in which that society lives and intends to live. ~ Zygmunt Bauman

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity. ~ Stanley Crouch

It reached a point where the paranoia was getting to me. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like people were hanging out, wanting to date, hooking up, wanting to hook up - it was relationships, relationships, relationships everywhere. Guys checking out girls, girls checking out guys. Dudes checking out dudes, chicks checking out chicks. Fuck! That's what being a teenager was all about. ~ Jess C. Scott

As with any detailed eyewitness testimonies after so many years, Eichmann's various accounts differ from one another and are not free of puzzling contradictions with other evidence.

-- The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), page 363. ~ Christopher R. Browning

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. ~ Denis McDonough

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language. ~ Lauren Slater

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense. ~ Philip Zaleski

I don't want to be a Hollywood star. I just want to do my job and enjoy it. My aim is to find my true identity and to remain true to myself. ~ Eva Green

Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are to be, as Slobbery Jack suggested, sold into slavery - our mere existence is punishment enough. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same. ~ David Novak

I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

The world's religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces. ~ Michael Shermer

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you. ~ Joseph O'Neill

If you manage to live long enough, most of your greatest fears become fond memories to look back on. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

Even if you meet the perfect person, it ain't gonna be at the perfect time. You're married, they're single. That's right. You're Jewish, they're Palestinian. You're a Mexican, they're a raccoon. You're a black woman, he's a black man. ~ Chris Rock

I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn't tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian's and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn't wracked with anxiety when there aren't any boys around. And she doesn't need them to live, which is what it feels like for me. ~ Kerry Cohen

In seasons of hiddenness our sense of value is disrupted, stripped of what "others" affirmed us to be. In this season God intends to give us an unshakable identity in Him, that no amount of adoration nor rejection can alter. ~ Alicia Britt Chole

In adolescence you have to separate yourself and establish your identity. So, being very independent anyway, I took charge. ~ George Carlin

My great blessing is my son, but I have daughters. I have white ones and Black ones and fat ones and thin ones and pretty ones and plain. I have gay ones and straight. I have daughters. I have Asian ones, I have Jewish ones, I have Muslim ones. ~ Maya Angelou

To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots. ~ Gordon Brown

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006). ~ Suzette Boon

From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence. ~ Eric Liu

I am interested to learn that a group of distinguished men and women is to be formed to spread knowledge and appreciation of the rehabilitation which is going forward in Palestine under Jewish auspices, and to add my expression to the sentiment among our people in favor of the realization of the age-old aspirations of the Jewish people for the restoration of their national homeland. ~ Herbert Hoover

Alan King, a comedian I adored, was considered society, and I was considered the Jewish kid from the neighborhood. ~ Don Rickles

The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a failure of humanity as a whole. ~ Moshe Katsav

It's exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity. ~ Henry James

Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands. ~ Elisabeth Badinter

When love wins, then it wins in fact only through love. But those who love cannot guarantee the victory of love. One can believe in the victory of love only in the sense that one believes in the identity of God and love. ~ Eberhard Jungel

Christians have a new identity. We are no longer 'in Adam' but 'in Christ'; no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit ... ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

No one likes to find out that the story he always believed about his own identity is false. ~ Orson Scott Card

Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person's, and singularities like this are where you find eternity. ~ Jonathan Franzen

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free. ~ Sarah Schulman

The only true happiness lies in knowing who you are ... and making peace with it. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Love is not what we become but who we already are ~ Stephen Levine

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess - that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians. ~ Oliver Sacks

I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world. ~ Kobo Abe

Who am I? Some answers have their own infinity.
With no end. And no beginning. ~ Talismanist Giebra

(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago-when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old. ~ Carl Sagan

You don't need validation or approval from anyone but yourself. Even if the entire world goes against, disagrees with or attempts to crush you, stand up for what you believe in, and stand up alone if you have to! It's better to die while living your own truth than to live in the truth of another. Lord Krishna in the holy Bhagavad Gita pointed this out when he said;

"It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."

Integrity is the key to freedom. It's only your own truth that can 'set you free.' It's perfectly fine if your truth doesn't match that of others because the experience of physical reality is a completely subjective one. It doesn't make either of you wrong, as long as you're both being true to yourselves, that's all that matters. ~ Craig Krishna

You are the space in which these thoughts arise, but not the thoughts themselves. ~ Chris Matakas

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are. ~ DaShanne Stokes