Jewish Mother Quotes & Sayings

I think my father knew how to be Jewish, but he didn't teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother's milk. — Edith Hahn Beer

You're at a Jewish wedding. How can you tell if it's Orthodox, Reform, or Liberal? A: In an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant. In a Reform wedding, the bride is pregnant. In a Liberal wedding the rabbi is pregnant. — David Minkoff

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. — Jonathan Franzen

Over protective? a butler in a grade- B movie? someones jewish mother? you got it — Margaret Weis

The child of a Jewish mother was Jewish, and the child of a Jewish father by a non-Jewish woman was not Jewish unless and until formally converted. — Norman Solomon

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

Yes indeed, both Muslim and Jewish!I, her father, am Muslim, at least on paper; her mother is Jewish, at least in theory. With us, religion is transmitted through the father; among Jews, through the mother. Therefore, according to the Muslims, Nadia was Muslim; according to the Jews, she was Jewish. She herself might have chosen one or the other, or neither, she chose to be both at once ... Yes, both at once and more. She was proud of all the bloodlines that had converged in her, roads of conquest or exile from central Asia, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Arab, Bessarabia, Armenia, Bavaria ... She refused to divide out her blood, her soul. — Amin Maalouf

My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don't consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother - and by extension, myself. — James McBride

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

We had a Jewish school; we had a Jewish club. My father was a main donor. My mother was on the committee of the school. — Harry Triguboff

And scars will lighten, they'll pale unless you keep rubbing at them...wait long enough, they'll fade. — C.F. Joyce

Any life he'd ever heard of, his own included, was burdened with emotions - love, loss, jobs, jealousy, money, death, pain. But if you were Jewish, always there was this extra one, the added pull at your endurance, the one more thing. There was that line in Thoreau about 'quiet desperation' - that was indeed true of most men. But for some men and women, for some fathers and mothers and children, the world still contrived that one extra test, endless and unrelenting. — Laura Z. Hobson

You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she's still going to expect a passel of grandkids. — Ayelet Waldman

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

-"What's that for?"
-"Have a little bread with your ice cream," she told me. — Astrid Amara

When I was a little kid, it was not uncommon for a cousin or an uncle, before they would even say 'Hello,' to gush, 'You know, your mother's brisket is just incredible; it's so good.' That was an inspiration for creating a love song in that well-worn terrain of the relationship between a Jewish boy and his mother. — Rick Moranis

My father was - actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force. — Joshua Bell

My mother was really involved with the Refusenik campaign with Soviet Union Jews. They would come and stay at our house, some of them, after they managed to get out of the Soviet Union at the time. There were things that were Jewish-related happening in my house quite consistently, but it was much more from a kind of activist standpoint. — Noreena Hertz

Growing up in a Jewish matriarchal world inside the patriarchal paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah, gave me increased perspective on gender issues, as it also did my gay brother and my lesbian sister. Our younger sister is the perfect Jewish-American wife and mother, and is fiercely proud of that fact. — Roseanne Barr

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

It is night at the front, a shadow, a shot. The Jew who has just fired
hears a moan ...
And then, mother, the hair stands up on his head, for only a few feet from him in the darkness the enemy voice is reciting in Hebrew the prayer of the dying. Ai, God, the soldier has cut down a Jewish brother! Ai, misery! He drops his rifle and runs into no man's land, insane with shame and grief. Insane, you understand? The enemy fires at him, his comrades shout at him to come back. But he refuses; he stays in no man's land and dies. Ai, misery, ai ... ! — Andre Schwarz-Bart

'Cullum' is Scottish, but I'm nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry. — Jamie Cullum

My mother smokes me out. We'll get these long periods of me thinking I'm too busy to call her up or e-mail her, and she'll send me something. My mom's a real whiner. I love her to death, but she always sends me these 'woe is me' things. I think she might be Jewish. I'm not sure. She's Baptist-Jewish, which is a double whammy. — Ronnie Dunn

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

The Daily Telegraph reported on April 9, 1937: 'Since M. Litvinoff ousted Chicherin, no Russian has ever held a high post in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.' It seems that the Daily Telegraph was unaware that Chicherin's mother was a Jewess. The Russian Molotov, who became Foreign Minister later, has a Jewish wife, and one of his two assistants is the Jew, Lozovsky. It was the last-named who renewed the treaty with Japan in 1942, by which the Kamchatka fisheries provided the Japanese with an essential part of their food supplies. — Arnold Leese

My mother always told me to embrace both sides of my background. And she also taught me one very useful thing when I was going to first grade. She said, "You're Bahamian and African-American on one side, and Russian-Jewish on the other. You're no more one than the other, and it's beautiful that you have all this. It makes your life all the more rich. But society will see you only as black." — Lenny Kravitz

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing ... This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read. — Allan Massie

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

I'd work to make it hip again to spend time in our fabled and fabulous land. But with a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, I would probably be better suited as mayor of New York. — Geraldo Rivera

Learning is good in and of itself ... the mothers of the Jewish ghettoes of the east would pour honey on a book so the children would know that learning is sweet. And the parents who settled hungry Kansas would take their children in from the fields when a teacher came. — George H. W. Bush

Nothing is sacred. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish martyrs, not even people starving of hunger. Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly, to exorcise the old monsters. — Francois Cavanna

I was this kid who had been raised in New York, and now all of a sudden, my mother decided that she was a Jewish divorcee and therefore she should be living in Miami Beach. — Natasha Lyonne

One Jewish lady was talking to the neighbor, and she said, "The psychoanalyst who is treating my son has said that my son suffers from an Oedipus complex." And the neighbor lady said, "Oedipus schmoedipus! Doesn't matter as long as he is a good boy and loves his mother! — Osho

I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am
and this ought to be made very clear
I am a very serious woman. — Bella Abzug

It's true that I wouldn't have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation. It's also this Jewish thing of naming and remembering people, and I think there is a sense of keeping that side of life going. — Nigella Lawson

So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here. — Harold Brodkey

I don't consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother. — Ben Elton

I couldn't lie anymore to my kids telling them that they are equal citizens in the state of Israel. They cannot be equal because in order to fit in and to be accepted and to be a citizen in Israel, you need a Jewish mother. So basically what I'm trying to tell my kids is just, it's their mother's fault and it's not my fault. — Sayed Kashua

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

His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song. — Lauren Groff

Mother said: "Isn't it better for the press to be able to criticize everyone equally?" "A wonderful idea," he said. "But you socialists live in a dream world. We practical men know that Germany cannot live on ideas. People must have bread and shoes and coal." "I quite agree," Mother said. "I could use more coal myself. But I want Carla and Erik to grow up as citizens of a free country." "You overrate freedom. It doesn't make people happy. They prefer leadership. I want Werner and Frieda and poor Axel to grow up in a country that is proud, and disciplined, and united." "And in order to be united, we need young thugs in brown shirts to beat up elderly Jewish shopkeepers? — Ken Follett

My daughter Gabby very kindly once said that she thinks I was a better mother because I was doing a job I loved. I now think guilt is a universal part of being a mother. I used to think it was Jewish-mother guilt but now I think it is working-mother guilt. — Donna Karan

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other's throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting - an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment. — Chaim Potok

One afternoon Walter brought Izzy to the house for lunch and, pointing to me, he said to Izzy, "He's one of your tribe."
Dobkins lifted his head to look at me and after a few seconds said, "I don't see it."
"The mother's a Jew," Walter answered, as if he were describing the breeding of a mongrel dog.
"Then you are a Jew," Izzy said, and sort of blessed me with his salami sandwich. — John William Tuohy

My mother was a Jewish General Patton. — Don Rickles

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not. — Dani Shapiro

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

My mother's mother is Jewish and African, so I guess that would be considered Creole. My mother's father was Cherokee Indian and something else. My dad's mother's Puerto Rican and black, and his father was from Barbados. — Meagan Good

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

Most people who go into show business want to go into show business. I wanted to be Porky Pig. That was my goal in life when I was five, to which my mother said, you can't be Porky Pig. You're Jewish! I don't think she realized what I wanted to do with the pig ... I didn't want to eat him, I wanted to voice him. — Bob Bergen

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

My mother should have been Jewish. She could have taught a class on how to induce guilt. — Lorna Luft

My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17. — Sarah Gavron

I never felt like a good Jew. My mother was not Jewish, and that makes me a non-Jew according to Jewish religious law. — Stephane Hessel

Mother humor is such a universal theme. I wrote a show called '25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.' I had people coming up to me after the show saying, 'I'm Baptist, and my mother is just like yours.' — Judy Gold

As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from
where she was born, who her parents were. When I asked she'd say, "God made me." When I asked if she was white, she'd say, "I'm light-skinned," and change the subject. She raised twelve black children and sent us all to college and in most cases graduate school. Her children became doctors, professors, chemists, teachers
yet none of us even knew her maiden name until we were grown. It took me fourteen years to unearth her remarkable story
the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, she married a black man in 1942
and she revealed it more as a favor to me than out of any desire to revisit her past. Here is her life as she told it to me, and betwixt and between the pages of her life you will find mine as well. — James McBride

My mother was born in San Juan. So I'm Puerto Rican, Jewish, colored and married to a white woman. When I move into a neighborhood, people start running four ways at the same time. — Sammy Davis Jr.

My mother's father was Jewish, so she was very conservative. She liked little, pretty music-orchestral-type things. — Andrae Crouch

You know how Van Nuys got its name? Well, one day my little old Jewish mother was visiting me, and I took her to the top of the Hollywood Hills and had her view the valley below just at sunset. Well, mama, what would you call that? And she said, Ver nize. — Joey Bishop

On my mother's side I'm Polish-Jewish, and on my father's side I'm Scottish puffin. — Tamsin Greig

For a long time, she sat and saw.
She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around.
Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words. — Markus Zusak

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother's side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld's brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight. — Augusten Burroughs

The idea of the book [Japanes Lover] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing. — Isabel Allende

An interesting difference between African-American humor and Jewish humor, in it's kind of basic or maybe most austere type form is, African-American humor, some of it comes out of playing the dozens in which you insult the other person or insult the other person's mother, and so much of Jewish humor is like, you're insulting yourself. It's totally self-deprecating. — Terry Gross

My father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him ... My mother is British, but she's of French extraction. — Joan Collins

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

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Even a secret agent can't lie to a Jewish mother. — Peter Malkin

My mom is a very warm, typical sort of Jewish-mother type. And my dad has a somewhat, um, different personality. — Peter Orszag

The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn't exist, Elijah was God's invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay. — Sloane Crosley

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s. — David Lee

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

When I listen to the complaints that follow just about every presidential debate, I'm reminded of the well-worn joke about the Jewish mother who buys her son two shirts. When he shows up at dinner wearing one, she says: 'What's the matter? You didn't like the other one?' — Jeff Greenfield

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

My mother's Puerto Rican and my father's Russian-Jewish, so we consider ourselves to be Jewricans or Puertojews. I think Puertojew sounds like a kosher bathroom, so I prefer Jewrican. — Rachel Ticotin

Naturally, my Jewish mother, like all Jewish mothers, wanted me to be a doctor, or a lawyer... or as she used to say, "Be something!" I wanted to be a cartoonist. Oy vey, a cartoonist was not on her list... I — Gideon Amichay

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. Izzy, she would say, did you ask a good question today? That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist. — Isidor Isaac Rabi

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

When I tell people I'm an Italian Jew, they're very amused by it. But obviously by blood I'm Jewish, because my mother is. — Antonio Sabato Jr.

As I grew into womanhood my confusion at the world became more apparent. I was taking comfort in behaviours that were familiar, not bathing, wearing multiple layers of clothes and, like my mother, I was bingeing on food. Of course I was still very much a lonely unsupported child myself when I got pregnant - one who had never been nurtured or mothered and as such I struggled with the responsibilities of parenthood. — Jane Hersey

I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. "Why was I so scared of everything?" I ask my mother nearly forty years later.
"Because you were born a Jewish person," she says. — Gary Shteyngart

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

The marriage of a Jewish son is a bittersweet prospect. There is relief, always, that he has navigated the tantalizing and plentiful assemblies of non-Jewish women to whom the children of the Diaspora are inevitably exposed: from the moment he enters secondary school there is the constant anxiety that a blue-eyed Christina or Mary will lure him away from the tribe. Jewish men are widely known to be uxorious in all the most advantageous ways. And so each mother fears that, whether he be short and myopic, boorish or stupid or prone to discuss his lactose intolerance with strangers, whether he be blessed with a beard rising almost to meet his hairline, he is still within the danger zone. Somewhere out there is a shiksa with designs on her son. Jewish men make good husbands. It is the Jewish woman's blessing as a wife, and her curse as a mother. — Francesca Segal

As scary as it was being raised by one Jewish mother, I have to feel for my kids because they have two Jewish mothers. — Judy Gold

My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church. — Wesley Clark

I resign," says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He's late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch. — Michael Chabon

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

No true Christian can carry within his heart hatred for any of God's children ... I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish. The Apostles were Jewish. The first martyrs were Jewish ... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite. — Pat Buchanan

At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim. — Michael Caine