Jewishness Quotes & Sayings

All a Jew has to do is recite a few proverbs or anecdotes to consider himself an expert on 'Jewishness.' — S. Ansky

I am a Jew. Those are four words of pride. My Jewishness is as deep as my genes. — Michael Douglas

The egg cream is psychologically the opposite of circumcision
it pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness. — Mel Brooks

The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a "Jewish writer, " but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling of laughter and trembling is particularly manifest in his novel Henderson the Rain King, that follows an archetypal Protestant American into mythic Africa. Bellow not only influenced and paved the way for other American Jewish writers like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, but naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities. — Hana Wirth-Nesher

There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie's prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime. — Christopher Hitchens

Our Jewishness is not a creed, it is ourself, our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith. — Maurice Samuel

In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation. — Zachary Lazar

When God hears us worshipping Him, that alone makes Him feel worthwhile to be God! — Raphael Ben Levi

The German mass murder of the Jews ... brought my Jewishness to the surface. — Ben Hecht

As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated. — Hannah Arendt

I and others like me believe Timerman was chosen by President Kirshner, first as Argentina's U.N. ambassador and then as foreign minister, among other reasons because he does not hide his Jewishness and his relations with the Jewish community and, therefore, can be a 'fig leaf' for her policy. — Pepe Eliaschev

Modern Christians who find Matthew's preoccupation with [Judaism] tedious and even distasteful, should realise that they live in a very different world from that of early Christians, for whom the 'Jewishness' of Jesus and his church was not just a matter of historical interest but an existential concern crying out for answers, answers which Matthew's gospel offered to provide. — R.T. France

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. — Philip Roth

The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it's important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two. — Rachel Corrie

I'm a very ritualistic person. I have to wash my face twice, and on the second wash before I rinse, I brush my teeth, then I rinse, then I floss, then I put on moisturizer. I'm ritualistic. Jewishness is very ritualistic. — Sarah Silverman

There was a time when she would have lingered to hear what amusing or sinister characteristic the woman attributed to the man's Jewishness - what business acumen or frugality or neurosis or pushiness she assigned to his tribe - and then, when she had let the incriminating words be spoken, she would have gently informed the woman that she was Jewish herself. But she had tired of that party game. Embarrassing the prejudices of your countrymen was never quite as gratifying as you thought it would be, the countrymen somehow never embarrassed enough. It was safer, on the whole, to enjoy your moral victory in silence and leave the bastards guessing. — Zoe Heller

The peculiarity for which they'd been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. — Ransom Riggs

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses - 'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing' - along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them. — Christopher Hitchens

I do not like the darkness, but please don't make the light too strong. — Raphael Ben Levi

I've discovered my Jewishness late in life. And I've really enjoyed exploring that world. — Beeban Kidron

Judaism teaches us the sentence, "The Lord is One," is not exclusive to Adonai, but rather inclusive of everything, everything, everything! Did you get that? Everything is One. This means far more than the teaching we are all connected. That teaching could be speaking biologically, or even atomically. I am talking about more than even the microscopic connection we all share. More than our DNA. — Laura Weakley

many saw their antifascism as a more important mark of personal identity than their Jewishness — Helen Graham

I learned nothing. Seriously, I can't tell you anything about Jews, I am a Jew, and I still deserve an F in Jewishness
I think it's Judaism
See, that's what I'm talking about. I don't know what Jews believe. Like, do Jews believe in heaven? Are we suppose to believe in that?
I don't know.
Yeah. Is there Jewish heaven? What happens when Jews die? You know? — Jesse Andrews

Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since. — P. J. O'Rourke

When Zionism becomes co-extensive with Jewishness, Jewishness is pitted against the diversity that defines democracy, and if I may say so, betrays one of the most important ethical dimensions of the diasporic Jewish tradition: namely, the obligation of co-habitation with those different from ourselves. — Judith Butler

I feel myself alien from everyone; that is my kind of Jewishness. — Frederic Raphael

So," Art [Green] said, "it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms. — Rodger Kamenetz

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal. — S. Ansky

I've liked being Jewish in America - there's a secular version of Jewishness there that's more about bagels and jokes than going to synagogues. — Beeban Kidron

Bubby scoffs at my question. A Jew can never be a goy, she says, even if they try their hardest to become one. They may dress like one, speak like one, live like one, but Jewishness is something that can never be erased. Even Hitler knew that. — Deborah Feldman

It was was very important not to cast any pearls before swine
especially when one of the swine was trying to keep kosher. — Jaffe Cohen

Significantly, it was Disraeli who said, "What is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few" - perhaps the most profound insight into the very principle by which the slow and insidious decline of nineteenth-century society into the depth of mob and underworld morality took place. Since he knew this rule, he knew also that Jews would have no better chances anywhere than in circles which pretended to be exclusive and to discriminate against them; for inasmuch as these circles of the few, together with the multitude, thought of Jewishness as a crime, this "crime" could be transformed at any moment into an attractive "vice." Disraeli's display of eroticism, strangeness, mysteriousness, magic, and power drawn from secret sources, was aimed correctly at this disposition in society. — Hannah Arendt

And so was the synagogue lifted and moved. It was in 1783 that wheels were attached, making the shtetl's ever-changing negotiation of Jewishness and Humanness less of a schlep. — Jonathan Safran Foer