Quotes & Sayings About Jewish Culture

It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory. — Elie Wiesel

Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too. — Hannah Ware

In WASP families, if you don't get along with someone, you have as little to do with them as possible. In Jewish families, you move next door, to make them as miserable as possible. — Doreen Orion

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture? — Ernest Van Den Haag

Being raised a Jew in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, my religious training emphasized learning the Hebrew language and Jewish festivals, history, and culture. We also remembered the Holocaust and supported the newly formed Jewish state of Israel. — Rick Strassman

Our kids are not Jewish, and they're not Catholic. They're not Episcopalian. They're not Buddhist. They're not anything. We do all the holidays to keep the traditions and the culture going, but I truly don't have a great feeling about any particular organized religion, and I don't think it's right to impose one on my kids. — Rhea Perlman

And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons. — Andrew Solomon

It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. — Michael Medved

The history of the bagel suggests that Americans' shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish, sometimes be "New York," and sometimes be American, or why it is that Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development - and a culinary symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture.

It is not. The bagel tells a different kind of American tale. It high- lights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities - for foods and eaters alike. — Donna Gabaccia

Culture Clash
Dylan says
when I meet his mother today
I shouldn't mention
that I'm Jewish.
I say
okay, but can I
tell her about
the HIV postive thing?
He gives me a look.
I give him one back — Sonya Sones

One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all. — William E. Rees

In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland. — Kevin Haworth

I'm sad because I want to bow out of my race and leave my beautiful identity? Chinese love Chinese. They love their little slant eyed, pale brown skinned babies. Pakistanis love their culture.Jewish people love their culture. A lot of Catholics want to marry Catholics because the want their religion to stay the same. — Muhammad Ali

I don't believe in God and all that. But I am Jewish, and very proud to be so, very proud of the culture. — Alan Sugar

What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.' — John Zorn

If you research history, I think we are all Jewish. It's the original culture. — Amar'e Stoudemire

My childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word turbulent. But it was a great time to grow up, the '70s and '80s in Brooklyn, East Flatbush. It was culturally diverse: You had Italian culture, American culture, the Caribbean West Indian culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture. Everything was kind of like right there in your face. A lot of violence, you know, especially toward the '80s the neighborhood got really violent, but it made me who I am, it made me strong. — Michael K. Williams

Jewish students, by culture and by ability and by the very nature of their liveliness, make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life. — Gordon Gee

The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important. — Marek Belka

We see God working in terms of Jewish culture to reach Jews, yet, refusing to impose Jewish customs on Gentiles. Instead non-Jews are to come to God and relate to Him in terms of their own cultural vehicles. We see the Bible endorsing, then, a doctrine we call biblical sociocultural adequacy in which each culture is taken seriously but none advocated exclusively as the only one acceptable to God. — Charles H. Kraft

What moves me is neither ethnocentric pride nor sectarian arrogance. I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures. But it is mine. — Theodore Bikel

[I] had very high hopes for Israel and it's lived up to and surpassed what I had in mind ... I've had such an eye-opening experience - a really nice glimpse into the culture and lives of Israelis and the Jewish people. — Omar Benson Miller

But, when I toil in the field of Jewish culture which I frequently do, I am indeed a Jewish artist. — Theodore Bikel

I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, "Put a jumper on — Amanda Craig

We stand with Israel as a Jewish democratic state because we know that Israel is born of firmly held values that we, as Americans, share: a culture committed to justice, a land that welcomes the weary, a people devoted to tikkun olam ... So America's commitment ... and my commitment to Israel and Israel's security is unshakeable. It is unshakeable ... I am proud to say that no U.S. administration has done more in support of Israel's security than ours. None. Don't let anybody else tell you otherwise. It is a fact. — Barack Obama

What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy. — Arthur Hertzberg

and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture. — Stefan Zweig

They called themselves socialists, and in some ways they were model socialists, fighting for the rights of workers, the way a lot of Europeans are socialists now. They hide behind their fake egalitarian principles, but really nothing has changed. Outwardly, they're no longer anti-Jewish. Instead they're now anti-Israel, but they're still filled with hatred. They have all these grand ideas, with culture and cathedrals and their music, but actually they're all just hooligans who want to kill people, identical to their anti-Semitic ancestors. — Mark S. Smith

[Biographical info on Rita]
Born and raised in a Sephardic Jewish family in which culture and love of learning were categorical imperatives, she abandoned religion and embraced atheism. She devoted herself to Science, getting to the point of renouncing marriage for scientific research.
... Unlike other people, Rita Levi Montalcini was a complete human being. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

My father is from Copenhagen and he lived there until he was in his late 20s. We always grew up with a lot of Danish culture at home. My mother is Jewish but we always celebrated Christmas because we loved the traditions of Danish Christmas. — Scarlett Johansson

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

For many years, our Messianic Jewish brothers and sisters have paid a great price. Other Jews have rejected them, and the Christian church would require they walk away from their traditions to fit into the Gentile culture. We must face these past wrongs. — Bill McCartney

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street. — Malcolm Gladwell

Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx. — Arthur Hertzberg

Dear Dan, I recently attended one of your lectures, and I was wondering why an Israeli guy telling Jewish jokes is wearing an Indian shirt?
D.A.: In general I am not someone who should be asked for fashion advice, but this particular case might be the one exception ... My solution? I figured that as long as I am wearing clothes from a different culture, no one is politically correct (and this includes almost everyone in the United States ) could complain that I'm underdressed. After all, any such critic could be offending a whole subcontinent. — Dan Ariely

If the main thing the next generations know about Jewish history is that we were persecuted and suffered, they will lose sight of the tremendous heritage of Jewish culture, theology, and wisdom. — Deborah Lipstadt

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested. — Elie Wiesel

The primary witnesses to Christmas are the accounts of Matthew and Luke. They were written as history, though for two different audiences, each with its own culture and conventions for preserving history. Matthew, the early records tell us, wrote originally in Hebrew for a Jewish-Christian audience. Luke wrote for Greek-speaking Gentiles and Jews. — Scott Hahn

To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called "midrash." Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally. — John Shelby Spong

The Jewish culture - people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music - these are cultural things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. I think that's a good thing. — Woody Allen

I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion. — Adam Mansbach

I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures or that the Jewish song is better than the song of my neighbor. — Theodore Bikel

Acceptance of race mixture was more developed in Arab culture than in Jewish culture. — Ali Mazrui

People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology. — Cynthia Ozick

I've had librarians say to me, "People in my school don't agree with homosexuality, so it's difficult to have your book on the shelves." Here's the thing: Being gay is not an issue, it is an identity. It is not something that you can agree or disagree with. It is a fact, and must be defended and represented as a fact.
To use another part of my identity as an example: if someone said to me, "I'm sorry, but we can't carry that book because it's so Jewish and some people in my school don't agree with Jewish culture," I would protest until I reached my last gasp. Prohibiting gay books is just as abhorrent ...
Discrimination is not a legitimate point of view. Silencing books silences the readers who need them most. And silencing these readers can have dire, tragic consequences. Never forget who these readers are. They are just as curious and anxious about life as any other teenager. — David Levithan

I have a friend who calls himself a Jewish-Buddhist, or a JewBu - he attends a synagogue where they meditate and chant Shalommmmmmmm - and when I asked how he reconciles the God of the Old Testament with the absence of a supreme god in Buddhism, he said, Maybe I don't believe in God. Maybe I only believe in culture. — Suzanne Morrison

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material. — Robert Mankoff

Religious pluralism is a popular belief in Western culture. At first it sounds very inclusive, but it is really just as exclusive as any other claims. Religious pluralists are those who argue that the "real God" is actually a mix of the gods of all the religions combined (ie. the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jehovah's Witness; and we can even throw in ancient Greek gods). By mixing all the major religions, they are discounting the exclusive truth claims to which religions strictly adhere. — Jon Morrison

Jewish success is due to a culture that promotes excellence, blessed with self discipline, education, dedication and a quest for leaving this world a better place. — Nonie Darwish

My father, my Rastafari culture, has a tight link to the Jewish culture. We have a strong connection from when I was a young boy and read the Bible, the Old Testament. — Ziggy Marley

I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture. — Gyorgy Ligeti

John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans. — Carl Bernstein

All peoples enjoy freedom, and freedom for the development of their culture ... There is no Jewish problem in the Soviet Union at all ... I have many friends who are Jews. — Anastas Mikoyan

I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise. — Aurora Levins Morales

In a segment of the Sermon on the Mount, appearing in Matthew 5, Jesus is reported to have set six new teachings of his against six old Jewish teachings. The latter are introduced by such words as 'You have heard that it was said by them of old time' and the former by 'But I say unto you.'
Since both the teachings of old time and Jesus' new teachings are predicated on the same profoundly mistaken views of human nature and of the world in general, it is unimportant for us here today to compare and contrast these teachings or to determine which is better or worse in some way or other. The point is that whether better or worse, in this way or that, both are lodged in an egregiously mistaken mythology
but in a mythology of enormous importance for us, because it is one of the wellsprings of Western culture. — Delos McKown

I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea. — Neil Peart

There is no Polish culture without Jewish culture. — Donald Tusk

The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters. — Simon Sebag Montefiore