Jewish Friends Quotes & Sayings

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

I was raised Jewish by atheistic-agnostic parents. During this journey, I had people from all walks and all faiths try to help. A Jewish priest who I was friends with wanted to lay hands on me - I didn't ask questions about how - I just said when and where and how often do you want to do it? I didn't argue. — Mark Nepo

Nobody has proved to my friends that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews. Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so. There simply was no way to reach it, no way, at least, that employed the procedures of logic and evidence. The bill-collector told me that Jews were filthy, that the home of a Jewish woman in his boyhood town was a pigsty; and the baker told me that the Jews' fanaticism about cleanliness was a standing affront to the "Germans," who were clean enough. What difference did the truth, if there were truth, make? I — Milton Sanford Mayer

I was raised Jewish, my wife was raised Catholic. Though we respect each other's heritage, and while many of our friends are deeply religious, we have chosen to focus on our similarities, not our differences. We teach our children compassion, charity, honesty and the benefits of hard work. — Steven Levitan

At first the team's primary goal was helping Jewish families escape the Third Reich. Together, they helped more than three hundred families pass through Belgium. Some went to England, and some made it to Canada. Jacob and his new friends provided safe houses, basic provisions, clothes, and false documents along the way. Once the invasion occurred, however, Maurice Tulek redirected them from rescuing Jews to other tasks considered more vital to the Allies. — Joel C. Rosenberg

I gathered all of the Jewish mukhtars, who have contact with Arabs in different villages and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galile and that it is going to burn all of the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time ... The tactic reached its goal completely. The building of the police station at Halsa fell into our hands without a shot. The wide areas were cleaned ... — Yigal Allon

Same first name as a president and an obscure comic book character. Half-Jewish. Excellent grammar. Easily nauseated. Likes Reese's and Oreos (i.e. not an idiot). Divorced parents. Big brother to a fetus. Dad lives in Savannah. Dad's an English teacher. Mom's an epidemiologist.
The problem is, I'm beginning to realize I hardly know anything about anyone. I mean I generally know who's a virgin. But I don't have a clue whether most people's parents are divorced, or what their parents do for a living. I mean, Nick's parents are doctors. But I don't know what Leah's mom does, and I don't even know what the deal is with her dad, because Leah never talks about him. I have no idea why Abby's dad and brother still live in DC. And these are my best friends. I've always thought of myself as nosy, but I guess I'm just nosy about stupid stuff.
It's actually really terrible, now that I think about it. — Becky Albertalli

I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music. — Janis Ian

Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu Government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations. — Jeremy Corbyn

Jewish Christmas' - that's what my gentile friends called Chanukah when I was growing up in Michigan in the thirties and forties. Anachronistic, yes, but they had a point. Observing the dietary laws of separating milk and meat dishes was far easier for the handful of Jewish families in our little town than getting through December without mixing the two holidays. — Faye Moskowitz

Note to goyim readers: not every Jew who grew up in Brooklyn was rich. And as long as I'm on it, here's another note: fuck you. That's all. Whether or not you assumed we were rich, if you're a goyim, fuck you. But keep reading, and tell your friends to buy the book. — Gilbert Gottfried

My first novel, 'Compromising Positions,' was a whodunit. The protagonist was a Long Island Jewish housewife who turns private investigator. But she was Jewish the way I was: lighting Sabbath candles but envying her Protestant and Catholic friends' December decorating options. — Susan Isaacs

Barack Obama is the most Jewish president we've ever had (except for Rutherford B. Hayes). No president, not even Bill Clinton, has traveled so widely in Jewish circles, been taught by so many Jewish law professors, and had so many Jewish mentors, colleagues, and friends, and advisers as Barack Obama. — Jeffrey Goldberg

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean. — Henry Louis Gates

Even if one is doing nothing more than eating Chinese food with one's Muslim and Jewish friends (don't order the pork lo mein), being together on the longest nights of the year, as the cold sets into the ground and makes it crunch, the warmth inside is infectious and transcendent. — Thomm Quackenbush

Some of my best friends are Jewish contributors to the Democratic Party. — Joe Biden

I want to say to you, friends, that the Jewish community in Palestine is going to fight to the very end. If we have arms to fight with, we will fight with those, and if not, we will fight with stones in our hands. — Golda Meir

I as a Muslim want you, as a Christian, to really be a perfect Christian. I want my Jewish friends to be perfect Jews, to live according to the highest principles of what it means to be a Jew, to be a Christian, to be a Muslim. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

They said, OK, nine [Louis] Brandeis's is too much, but one is OK. So, with friends like that, and so forth. But, yes, the idea that because he was Jewish he would rule a particular way was an ugly undercurrent of the hearings, which resonates with current claims that a judge can't be impartial because of his or her background or ethnicity or race. It's, I guess, a small comfort that in the end the Brandeis vote wasn't close. — Jeffrey Rosen

In the Muslim world, this notion that somehow everything is the fault of the Israelis lacks balance - because there's two sides to every question. That doesn't mean that sometimes one side has done something wrong and should not be condemned. But it does mean there's always two sides to an issue. I say the same thing to my Jewish friends, which is you have to see the perspective of the Palestinians. Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. — Barack Obama

I mean, I grew up in the Valley. All my friends were white Jewish kids. So the Latino kids thought I was this white girl. — America Ferrera

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person. — Meghan O'Rourke

I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don't travel. I really don't, and if I did, I probably wouldn't visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can't help but feel that the Jews didn't really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can't really turn it back. (#92 ff.) — Isaac Asimov

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

We're agnostics, she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends. We don't know if there's a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don't. — Tom Perrotta

My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews ... If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed. — Anne Frank

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. — Arthur C. Clarke

God created all the animals on this day and now said to them: "let us make man on our image". My friends, nothing that I could ever say to people is as important as this understanding of the human being, we are created in God's image and we are created in animal's image. This is one of the deepest Jewish understandings of the human being .. because the understanding that I am part animal and part God keeps me saying: I know what I need to aspire to, God, but I also know that I have to make peace with the fact that I am also an animal .. I am half animal .. animals are not created in anybody's image, WE ARE in their image and God's image. — Dennis Prager

That's not really important what religion people are attached to, because by the same argument I have a lot of Christian friends and Moslem friends. It's just happened that I do have a lot of relatives and friends who are Jewish. — Paul McCartney

I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence. — Matisyahu

A solution of two national states - a Jewish state, Israel; an Arab state, Palestine. The Palestinians are our closest neighbors. I believe they may become our closest friends. — Shimon Peres

When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul. — Christopher Hitchens

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 cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast. — Caroline Leavitt

Every now and then you get a nice Jewish kid who likes black people and they would come in, and it would be a stream of them, and have black friends and really feel the black struggle on the acting tip and it's a reason why all of us are not dying in the movie. — Mike Epps

When Jesus calls his disciples 'brothers' and 'friends', he is contradicting general Jewish usage and breaking through into a new concept of brotherhood which is not tribal, but open to any person. — David Kirk

I don't often want to speak. I try to be a reasonable person and to be diplomatic, but you go to that place and you see the settlements, you see what has happened to the land that was owned by the Palestinians. I have often said to my Jewish friends: "Please just remember where you come from. Remember Yahweh, who said to the Israelites, 'Treat the alien well with justice.'" — Desmond Tutu

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

Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew? — Etgar Keret

They're good people. I have a lot of Jewish friends. — Alex Jones

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

We were facing a great number of uncertainties and dangers. First, whether the Russians would treat us decently, us who had lived through the German occupation; whether the survivors from Transnistria would come back; how many had survived the retreat of the Germans; whether our friends and relatives in the Russian army and those who had fled voluntarily would come home; whether any of them had survived the almost three years of war; whether we'll have food to survive. The Russian military, in pursuit of the retreating Germans, were angry, aggressive and contemptuous of the local population. The ubiquitous question: Why did they kill all the other Jews and left you alive? That thought implied that the survivors were all collaborators of the Nazis, whether they were Jewish or not. — Pearl Fichman

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 have Jewish friends. I have Middle Eastern friends. I have Spanish and Italian and British and Scottish and German friends and Austrian friends, and guess what? They all deal with homophobia. It's an earthling epidemic; it's not isolated in the black community. — Jussie Smollett

I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews! — Anne Frank