Jewish Family Quotes & Sayings

The name " Rothschild" came from the red shield, or, as it is said in German, the " rothes schild," which designated the house in which the family lived. In those days there were no street numbers. Each family hung out some picture or emblem to mark their abode. When families were compelled to choose surnames this Jewish family, remembering the red shield, decided to call themselves Rothschild. — Anonymous

I actually have a life I said I wanted to have. I wanted to tell stories I want and be with my family. I'm whispering it, because I'm a quarter Jewish and afraid it's all going to be taken away. — Helen Hunt

Christianity had not started off as the ideology of an empire. Virtually nothing is known about its supposed founder, Jesus of Nazareth. There is not even any definite proof he was a historical rather than a mythical figure. Certainly the proof is not to be found in the Christian New Testament. It claims his birth was in Bethlehem in the Roman province of Judaea, where his family had gone for a census during the time of Augustus. But there was no census at the time stated and Judaea was not a Roman province at the time. When a census was held in AD 7 it did not require anyone to leave their place of residence. Similarly, the New Testament locates Jesus's birth as in the time of King Herod, who died in 4 BC. Roman and Greek writers of the time make no mention of Jesus and a supposed reference by the Jewish-Roman writer Josephus is almost certainly a result of the imagination of medieval monks.100 — Chris Harman

My mom's family is Russian Jewish, and my dad's Puerto Rico Catholic, so it's kind of a weird mix. — Ian Gomez

I'm of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little ... Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened. — Sasha Roiz

In addition, the long shadow of the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews perished - going, as the younger generation in Israel is constantly reminded, 'like lambs to the slaughter' - touches every family in the new homeland. Pride in being Jewish and determination to prove that never again will they let their defences down has its effect upon everybody in the service, from the youngest recruit to the most experienced veteran. For such reasons, the men and women of the Israeli intelligence community are more dedicated than their equally patriotic colleagues who work in the same line of business in other countries on behalf of the CIA, KGB or MI6. The — Ronald Payne

For instance, some evangelicals have turned Proverbs 31 into a woman's job description instead of what it actually is: the blessing and affirmation of valor for the lives of women, memorized by Jewish husbands for the purpose of honoring their wives at the family table. It is meant as a celebration for the everyday moments of valor for everyday women, not as an impossible exhausting standard. — Sarah Bessey

Mother, just like the last fifty-five thousand times you've mentioned it, I have no intention of getting married and having a family. You're just going to have to content yourself with the grandchildren you already have. ...
...
His mother narrowed her eyes at him. He could see her mind working on how to get him to come around. She was never going to give up, and she would be fit and healthy enough to badger him about it for years and years.
...
Lance had heard humans talk about the tenacity of Jewish mothers. He didn't know any, but he'd be surprised if they could hold a candle to the relentless herding instinct of a quickened mother who was descended on both sides from border collies. — Eli Easton

I have excellent relationships with Jewish organizations and participate every year in a Hanukkah celebration with my family. There haven't been any anti-Semitic tendencies in my team for a long time. — Viktor Yushchenko

I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun. — Leonard Susskind

Whereas Micah was the leader and Henri was the professor, Jacques was the class clown. Mischievous and full of life, he was always playing pranks yet narrowly escaping getting caught by teachers and other authorities. And though he was no more Jewish than Henri, he, too, was very fond of the Kahn family and their Jewish friends. He abhorred the Nazi goose-steppers and the ugly anti-Semitism of the times. In Avi's and Jacob's eyes, these three young men were ideal recruits for the Resistance. They proved to be fast studies, hard workers, and exceedingly brave. — Joel C. Rosenberg

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

The Jewish community is all about love and family, which is the most important thing in my life, too. — Gregg Sulkin

I was born in Berlin on March 15, 1830, the second son of the royal university professor K. W. L. Heyse and his wife Julie, nee Saaling, who came from a Jewish family. — Paul Heyse

I had a bat mitzvah, was confirmed, went to Jewish summer camp, I go to temple for the High Holy Days. I think, like most people in their early 20s, I kind of strayed away from it. I think once I have a family I'll be back into it. — Lizzy Caplan

Once a week, beginning at sunset on Friday and until sunset on Saturday, the family had to pause. A Jewish merchant had explained the Sabbath to Agios already, back in Egypt. No devout Hebrew could work or travel on that day. If they were near a temple, the family went there. If no temple was available, they prayed where they were. When — Glenn Beck

My father was from a secular Jewish family and my mother from a nominally Christian (Episcopalian) one. They were not religious as adults. They did, however, believe in educating their children about the Bible. They viewed this as an essential part of any education. — Mike Berenstain

And I remember that about three years before that, her first record had come out. And I just remember really liking this one song off it called "In My Bed" and being a little bit enamored. This, you know, this young kind of Jewish girl from North London, you know, I have the same thing - from a Jewish family from North London - with this incredible voice. — Mark Ronson

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition. — Gloria Steinem

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background. — Nouriel Roubini

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family. — Cesar Milstein

I think we were raised in a nice Texas Jewish family where education was the most important thing, and close behind that was the arts. It was emphasized and expected that we'd play piano. — Lisa Loeb

Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others. — Georg Solti

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that. — Eugene Jarecki

I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age. — Marge Piercy

I'm an atheist. But I absolutely love religions and the rituals. Even though I don't believe in God. We celebrate pretty much every religion in our family with the kids. They love it, and when they say, 'Are we Jewish?' or 'Are we Catholic?' I say, 'Well, I'm not, but you can choose when you're 18. But isn't this fun that we do seders and the Advent calendar?' — Jodie Foster

Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity. — Margot Sunderland

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view. — Walter Kohn

I grew up in an Orthodox family, as I grew older, I became Conservative and that's how it ended up. But I've developed that Jewish feel to my act from my surroundings and my family. — Don Rickles

The great heroes of other ancient cultures were strong and clever and virtuous, but the great Jewish heroes copulated with slaves (Abraham), showed they were willing to allow others to have sex with their wives (also Abraham), cheated their brothers, seduced their in-laws, murdered, started civil wars through terrible family decisions, yet somehow-through a mixture of humility, near-insanity, and good fortune-served as conduits of God's action in the world. — William McDavid

Hence the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed. — Leon Pinsker

The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family. — Erica Jong

Most major Christian groups - Catholics, Byzantines, Nestorians, Jacobites - believe Mary's father was a man named Joachim. But this is contested. The Koran claims she descended from a highly respected family, that of Imran. As does the Jewish faith. — James Rollins

My identity has always been confused. Born in Edinburgh of a Scottish/Russian/Jewish mother and an English/Irish/Catholic father, there is no form of guilt to which I was not subjected in my childhood. Members of my immediate family live all over the world - a diaspora of cousins, aunts, uncles and more in a dizzying mix. — Sara Sheridan

No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish. — Adam Mansbach

Jews were segregated from 1933 on. We could only play against other Jewish teams. This wasn't just social segregation; this was the beginning of the extermination of the Jews. That's why my family left Germany in 1938. — Henry A. Kissinger

My mother's side is Italian; my father's side is Jewish. We're the kind of family where every Sunday night we have dinner with all 19 of my cousins. — Lea Michele

There is a Jewish tradition of family, too, but then not all Italian or Jewish families are close. — Richard Rogers

I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material. — Michael Sandel

My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don't have one identity. I'm Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish. — Sara Sheridan

My mother is the antithesis of a typical Jewish mother, she is very soft-spoken and takes more naps that a cat. As a result, I've always longed for someone to really annoy the shit out of me. — Chelsea Handler

If you follow these simple truths, you will gain control over your financial future, and probably be able to accumulate millions and millions of dollars. These truths are not just about money, but about self discipline and the proof of love between yourself and your family. While I have gleaned these truths from the wisdom of the Jewish people, they will work for anyone in any setting regardless of religious background or income level. This is the oldest financial system in history and the only one that has survived the test of time. — Celso Cukierkorn

When one gets to Clement or Hippolytus, we are clearly a long way from what we find in Paul and the Gospels, where the influence of the Passover is still strongly present and the meal is seen as a family meal, taken in the home, a memorial meal to remember Jesus' death until his return ... Here then is a cautionary reminder - the less Jewish the approach one takes to the Lord's Supper, the more likely one is to be wrong about one's assessment of what is the case about the elements. — Ben Witherington III

I definitely have a strong sense of my Jewish and Israeli identity. I did my two-year military service; I was brought up in a very Jewish, Israeli family environment, so of course my heritage is very important to me. — Gal Gadot

At home we ate fish every Friday, as Catholics were then supposed to do. Being Jewish, I compromised. I wore a hat when I ate fish, out of respect for my own religion and the fish's family. — George Burns

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase. — Stephanie Coontz

The election of the Jewish people is the result of God's falling in love with Abraham and founding a family with him. — Meir Soloveichik

I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [ ... ] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents. — Stephen Jay Gould

If you really think there's a Santa, why don't you sit on the front steps all night in the freezing cold and see if he climbs down any chimneys tonight. Good luck. And since we're a family that isn't lucky enough to have a chimney, how would Santa get into our house? Does he bring a locksmith with him? And it probably would have to be a Jewish locksmith, because a Christian locksmith is going to want to be home with his family. And how many Jewish locksmiths are there? None. — Lewis Black

I am quite international. My background, born in Turkey. My family is a Jewish family from Iran, so I went from Turkey to Iran to Israel, and then grew up in Italy and ended up in U.S. for graduate school. So I tend to look at things from an international perspective, and I think that gives you a little bit of a broader view of what's going on. — Nouriel Roubini

I'm a good girl, and I have a very good Jewish family who brought me up very well. — Jess Glynne

1945 Elsie, I hope this letter finds its way to your good hands. Tobias and I are among friends in Zurich. The news of the Allied invasion of Garmisch is bittersweet. Though we are German, our Fatherland is no longer a welcoming place. The Jewish families I hid for over a year - the Mailers and the Zuckermanns - lost nearly all their extended family members over the course of these wretched years. Thanks to your engagement ring, we were able to bribe the SS guards and smuggle Nanette Mailer, her friend, and the Zuckermanns' niece, Tabita, from KZ Dachau before the march. Unfortunately, Tobias's sister, Cecile, succumbed to — Sarah McCoy

In spite of herself, Jean Louise grinned. Alexandra could be relied upon to produce a malapropism on occasions, the most notable being her comment on the gulosity displayed by the youngest member of a Mobile Jewish family upon completing his thirteenth year: Alexandra declared that Aaron Stein was the greediest boy she had ever seen, that he ate fourteen ears of corn at his Menopause. — Harper Lee

I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family. If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don't have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that. — Susanne Bier

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex. — Donald Tusk

[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

Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses. — Charlie Munger

I have a son who's been raised Jewish because his mom is Jewish. I have a whole different set of holidays to celebrate. Everybody is thrown together with their family in such an intense way, opening all of that stuff again. You're cooped up with everybody and forced to exist with them, and you're forced to try to relate to them in this way that's more open. I guess that just doesn't work for a lot of people. — Paul Giamatti

My father was ethnically Jewish, but his family converted to Catholicism. — Tom Hollander

29Then He touched their eyes, saying, "According to your faith, let it be done for you." 30And their eyes were opened. And Yeshua warned them sternly, "See that no one knows." 31But they went out and spread the news about Him all around that region. — Messianic Jewish Family

I came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family. — Lenny Abrahamson

When my children were growing up, we began every family meal - which included breakfast and dinner every day - with a prayer. We are Jewish and so it was the prayer over bread, when we were having bread, or the catch-all prayer for everything when we weren't. — Ezekiel Emanuel

Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had surged to power. Now they held Germany by the throat. The Gestapo was rapidly creating a cruel and brutal police state that treated all but true Aryans like dogs and swine. That was certainly true for Jews like the Weisz family. In just the last few years, they and all of the Jewish families in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship and denied many of their most basic rights. Jacob's father, an esteemed professor of German history, had been summarily fired from his prestigious post at Frederick William University in Berlin. The Weisz family had been forced out of their beautiful, spacious home in the suburbs of the capital. They'd had a big red J stamped on their official papers and had been denied permission to leave the country. So they had left Berlin and made a new home in Siegen. — Joel C. Rosenberg

Once Mel Gibson revealed himself to be, like the president, a person of serious religious faith, the gloves came off. Mel Gibson has done a major favor for serious faith, both Jewish and Christian, in America. He has made it "cool" to be religious, but in so doing he has unleashed the hatred of secular America against himself personally, against his work and against his family. God bless him. — Daniel Lapin

Johann Clement watched the blows fall. First there had been wild talk and then printed accusations and insinuations. Then came a boycott of Jewish business and professional people, then the public humiliations: beatings and beard pullings. Then came the night terror of the Brown Shirts. Then came the concentration camps. Gestapo, SS, SD, KRIPO, RSHA. Soon every family in Germany was under Nazi scrutiny, and the grip of tyranny tightened until the last croak of defiance strangled and died. — Leon Uris

When asked how he had had such an impact as a great sage and leader in the twentieth-century Jewish world, the Chafetz Chaim answered, "I set out to try to change the world, but I failed. So I decided to scale back my efforts and only try to influence the Jewish community of Poland, but I failed there, too. So I targeted the community in my hometown of Radin, but achieved no greater success. Then I gave all my effort to changing my own family, and failed at that as well. Finally, I decided to change myself, and that's how I had such an impact on the Jewish world. — Alan Morinis

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe. — Roald Hoffmann

My family was totally non-religious. There was no question we were Jewish, but we were not observant. — Elayne Boosler

The only trouble was, I wasn't with a group of my peers. Who are my peers? [ ... ] And there I was with a dismal coven of repentant soaks
a car salesman who had fallen from the creed of the Kiwanis, an Jewish woman whose family misunderstood her attempts to put them straight on everything, a couple of schoolteachers who can't ever have taught anything except Civics, and some business men whose god was Mammon, and a truck-driver who was included, I gather, to keep our eyes on the road and our discussions hitched to reality. Whose reality? Certainly not mine. So the imp of perversity prompted me to make pretty patterns of our discussions together, and screw the poor boozers up worse then they'd been screwed up before. For the first time in years, I was having a really good time. — Robertson Davies

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

I'm Jewish, and my family is Jewish. I was very interested in Woody Allen when I was growing up, but I don't think of myself as a Jewish writer. I'm more from suburbia, American suburbia. I'm more from the '70s than I am from Judaism. — Charlie Kaufman

I wouldn't trade anything for family time. To me, it is more important than everything else, and I have a very deep-rooted belief in it, which is influenced by my Jewish faith. That's a very great source of who I am and what I believe in. — Felicity Kendal

The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even "realized" the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: "You're going to die. And you're going to die. And you're going to die." I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused. — Elif Batuman

When you have a Jewish mother who has a very strong Jewish family, it's very ethnic in its practices. Eating brisket, the food and the family and the interconnectedness for better or worse. — Goldie Hawn

It's based around a Jewish family but it really is a universal theme about getting along and coming along. — Jami Gertz

I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents. — Danny Meyer

My dad left when I was a little boy and I grew up with my mother's family. There were foundations in the U.S. where Jewish people got together and sent money to Cuba, so we got some of that. We were a poor family, but I was always a happy kid. — William Levy

Just before Obama's nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: 'When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli' to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, 'a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.'

According to Wright, Obama then told him, 'You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we've decided is that it's best for you not to be out there in public.' But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement. — Ronald Kessler

The ritual of the blood on the lintel of the door, which protected the Israelites from the angel of death, is an apotropaic (avoidance) ritual, such that the family in question would be 'passed over' by the aforementioned denizen of death. Later Jewish and Christian ideas that amalgamated this story with ideas about the scapegoat's providing a substitutionary remedy should not be read into the original tale. The scapegoat symbolized the removal of sin from the nation and perhaps the judging of a substitute. The blood of the Passover lamb on the door symbolized not a sacrifice for sin but rather protection from divine judgment. There is a difference. — Ben Witherington III

I can't explain the motive of ever Christian, but for me... the answer is obvious. Our Savior was Jewish. His disciples were Jewish. They were born in Israel. They lived in the Promised Land. Jesus preached to 'the lost sheep of Israel.' He died on the cross in Jerusalem. He was raised from the dead in Jerusalem. And the Bible teaches that our Savior is coming back again to reign and rule from Jerusalem. Why shouldn't we love Jews, then? Jesus never taught us to hate anyone. He taught us to love, and he set the supreme example for us to follow. Jesus commanded us to love one another. He commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves. You're my neighbor, Jacob, If not you, then who? You're from the same family and people as my Savior. How could I hate you or do you wrong? — Joel C. Rosenberg

Miami Beach - that's where I grew up, in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me, my great-grandmother - a Holocaust survivor, who was my roommate - my grandparents, my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house. — Brett Ratner

Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library. — Anthony Horowitz

The patriarchal, the Jewish, and the Christian dispensations, are evidently but the unfolding of one general plan. In the first we see the folded bud; in the second the expanded leaf; in the third the blossom and the fruit. And now, how sublime the idea of a religion thus commencing in the earliest dawn of time; holding on its way through all the revolutions of kingdoms and the vicissitudes of the race; receiving new forms, but always identical in spirit; and, finally, expanding and embracing in one great brotherhood the whole family of man! Who can doubt that such a religion was from God? — Mark Hopkins

Posing as someone, or something, else is the story of many women and men who have experienced repression and made a bid for freedom. It is the story of a gay U.S. Marine who had to pretend he was straight. It is the story of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany posing as Protestants. It is the story of a black South African who tried to make his skin lighter under apartheid. — Jenny Nordberg

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was ... (He touches the coffin) ... not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania - and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. — Tony Kushner

I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats. — Elliott Abrams

No one in my family is Jewish; no one was raised as a Jew, me included. — Amar'e Stoudemire

My mom, for most of her life, was a Holocaust denier. And it was terrible for the entire family to have to deal with until, finally, a couple years ago, we had an intervention. And we had a rabbi come into the home, had him walk her through the history of the Jewish people, and then he made her watch "Schindler's List." And after that, my mom did a complete 180. Now she can't believe it only happened once. — Anthony Jeselnik

Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins. — Malcolm Gladwell

When I was kid, yeah, my family, my parents wanted me to marry a Jewish girl because that was what they taught their children, and thought it would be an easier life for me to raise a Jewish kid. And I have a Jewish wife, I have a Jewish kid. They seem pretty happy about it. — Adam Sandler

By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass. — Caroline Leavitt

Little Asher Lev was the juncture point of two significant family lines, the apex, as it were, of a triangle seminal with Jewish potentiality and freighted with Jewish responsibility. But he was also born with a gift. — Chaim Potok

On the whole, my family had always adopted a reserved attitude toward Zionism; my great-uncle Edmond had acted on his own in generously supporting Jewish Palestine, for reasons more humanitarian and religious than political. But the devastation caused by the war and the extermination of six million Jews radically changed all of our former attitudes. The idea of a Jewish homeland acquired an intense emotional appeal; I myself became an ardent Zionist.. — Guy De Rothschild

Freud was the son of a Jewish merchant who had to move his whole family to Vienna because he couldn't get work. He, as a boy, had to watch his father be mocked and abused on the street for being Jewish ... You develop a thick skin and you develop a certain kind of wit to defend yourself. — Viggo Mortensen

My family is Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist and Catholic. I don't believe in man-made religions. — Whoopi Goldberg

If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it. — Adolf Hitler

Creating a meal for my friends and family, sitting together, eating, laughing and talking - that is when I am so happy. Oh my God, if you could see how much food I make - I am the original Jewish mother. — Gwyneth Paltrow