At the heart of anti-Semitism lies Moses. He made a catastrophic error, a terrible mistake, and all anti-Semitism for two thousand years stems from his misjudgement. Moses said we Jews could remain a people without having a land. He said we don't need territory to hold onto our Jewish identity. This was a disaster.
A. B. Yehoshua
The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.
It's not what the rabbis say that defines Jewishness but what we Israelis do every day - our actions and our values.
We are a country that lacks riches. The Jewish brain, that's what we have. Everything that we've had and will have in this country is the direct and clear product of higher education. If we harm this system, we will drastically decline and cease to exist.
Aaron Ciechanover
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.
The official Hamas charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of the Jewish state.
Aaron Klein
I'm Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.
Aasif Mandvi
I'm not super, super religious. If this is okay to say, I'm more culturally Jewish.
Abbi Jacobson
I'm a nomad. A Jewish road warrior. I do not have a concept of home. I wish I did. But I live with the idea that we have to get out of town before dawn.
Abbie Hoffman
The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life.
Abraham Cahan
With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
Abraham Maslow
A lot of Jewish kids do identify with us.
Ad-Rock
I represent an emerging group of leaders within the Jewish community who are conservatives; not just fiscal conservatives, but social conservatives as well.
Adam Hasner
My dad is a Deadhead, my mom's a Jewish-American princess from Jersey.
Adam Lambert
Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn't an ability to identify with a national heritage - you'll never hear a Jew say 'I'm German' or 'I'm Polish,' without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.
Adam Mansbach
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.
Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
Well, I have been in physical altercations, but they weren't really fights because I am too scared and Jewish. So anytime that it gets to a point where there is gonna be a fight, I immediately apologize.
Adam Pally
I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.
Al Alvarez
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.
It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.
There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.
Twenty five percent of Israeli citizens are not even Jewish. Anybody can become an Israeli citizen if you qualify. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship.
I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.
I am deeply concerned that, without peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish and democratic nature of Israel is in danger. That's why I have opposed Israel's settlement policy since 1973, and that's why I have favored a two-state solution since 1967.
The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
It was sort of assumed, from the time I was born, really, that I would go to college. That's sort of the way that Jewish families in New Jersey handled things; that was the norm.
A summary of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!
There's a charm, there's a rhythm, there's a soul to Jewish humor. When I first saw Richard Pryor perform, I told him, 'You're doing a Jewish act.'
When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.
I was kind of the comic relief in my household. We had a chronic illness in the family. And so, a lot of emergency room visits, and my role was to be silly and add levity, and we're Jewish. So every Passover is a performance. You kind of learn to role play and do voices at the Passover Seder.
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.
I always loved performing, but my parents were very practical, middle-class Jewish people.
The Emanuels are Jewish mafia. It's not that Jews are bad. It's just that they are the head of the Jewish mafia in the United States.
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 think everybody has the ability to fall in love with a man or with a woman or a white person or a black person or a Jewish person or a Protestant person or whatever.
If you think about it, there aren't that many women who are in their 40s, who are Jewish and funny and stage-worthy.
The fact that I am not Jewish by religion does not prevent me from connecting to the Jewish nation's spirituality.
I had a Hebraic wedding in New York, so I'm definitely Jewish.
If you research history, I think we are all Jewish. It's the original culture.
No one in my family is Jewish; no one was raised as a Jew, me included.
Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.
People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
I was born in a tiny little enclave of terrified Jewish refugees, less than half a million of them, with no clear perspective of a future - hopes, yes, but no clear perspective.
Throughout my childhood, a heavy cloud of pain and disappointment and insecurity hovered over my home, my little street, my neighborhood, Jewish Jerusalem, Jewish Israel.
To tell you the truth, in the old Jewish shtetls, if your husband died, sometimes they'd have you marry the brother, and my grandparents were actually stepbrother and stepsister.
I just dress like... I'm an old black man. Sorry! Like I'm an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it's still the '50s.
