Top 76 Jewish Life Quotes
#1. Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.
Jonathan Sacks
#2. We have our own values; we build our own special, our JEWISH life - and we are proud, so very proud.
Meir Kahane
#4. 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
#5. To outsource your memory to machines - which is what many of us do with regard to our use of search engines - seems to me to be fairly antithetical to the basic qualities of Jewish life that have kept the Jews alive for so long.
Joshua Cohen
#6. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has suggested that the important thing is not a person's identity but his or her identifications.
Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life
David Kaufmann
#7. My six handbooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events mostly followed the trajectory of my adult Jewish life.
Anita Diament
#8. Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
Daniel Libeskind
#9. For I firmly believe that Jewish life, indeed any communal life, can only be organized according to democratic principles.
Theodore Bikel
#10. I hardly exaggerate. Jewish life consists of two elements: Extracting money and protesting.
Nahum Goldmann
#11. The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.
Simon Schama
#12. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#13. 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
#14. You have to be realistic about terrorism. Certain groups of people, certain groups, Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montanta, are going to continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long, long time.
George Carlin
#15. The greatest Jewish tradition is to laugh. The cornerstone of Jewish survival has always been to find humor in life and in ourselves.
Jerry Seinfeld
#16. He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.
Tom Hayden
#17. I don't really know of the Jewish tradition of comedy, only the Jewish tradition of not keeping your mouth shut. Complaining about all that is hard, unfair or ridiculous in life-having strong feelings, and not being able to suppress them. That, to me, is Jewish.
Fred Melamed
#18. I think there are bound to be obstacles in any path to success. I mean, I'm Jewish, and there's nothing I can do about that. Instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, I got over it and did something with my life.
Zach Braff
#20. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.
Judith Butler
#21. I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish State, with a Jewish majority, on both sides of the Jordan.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky
#22. For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots - the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.
Os Guinness
#23. Jewish tradition holds that, given a choice between life and death, one should always choose life.
Miriam M. Brysk
#24. An ancient Jewish teaching holds that to save a life is to save the whole world.
Sam Bourne
#25. Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.
Langston Hughes
#26. Of course a carp is just a carp, waiting to become either your pet, or a gefilte fish. But am I wrong to also see this body lying in a pool of blood, being fibbed about in plain sight, as a metaphor for all the corpses and blood never discussed?
Leela Corman
#27. This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.
Karl Marx
#28. I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.
Steven Van Zandt
#29. You can find old Jewish newspapers from Detroit that have my promotional ad in them. It was a totally insane time in my life. Paul Rudd was also a bar mitzvah emcee, you know? It was like being a local rock star in Detroit.
James Wolk
#30. I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.
Jacob K. Javits
#31. The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle.
Mordechai Anielewicz
#32. As a first generation Jewish American, I have witnessed firsthand Jewish immigrants who have come to this Nation in order to create a better life for themselves, their families, and future generations.
Jan Schakowsky
#33. Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish.
Philip Zimbardo
#34. If God never gave me one more thing in my life, then you, right now, would be enough. You are my Dayeinu
S. Khubiar
#35. Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#36. 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
#37. I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.
Susan Jacoby
#38. I am not a Jew in the synagogue and a feminist in the world. I am a Jewish feminist and a feminist Jew in every moment of my life.
Judith Plaskow
#39. Circumcision is obligatory for Jewish-born males - it must be performed on the eighth day after birth and is only postponed in the case of threat to the life or health of the child. Muslim parents also circumcise their male children.
Brad Sherman
#40. But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.
Lauren F. Winner
#41. Anyone who makes the life of Jewish people difficult or grievous, as did the Pharaoh, as did Hitler, will be cursed by God.
John Hagee
#42. Look, I play all these tough guys and thugs and strong, complex characters. In real life, I am a cringing, neurotic Jewish mess. Can't I for once play that on stage?
Jason Isaacs
#43. His hope was that she would finish her damn book quietly and just leave; that one morning he would awaken and go up to the attic, and Anne Frank would be gone, and he could go on with his life, Anne-free. One hundred percent Frankless. Now with Less Genocide.
Shalom Auslander
#44. I am very proud of being Jewish. I went to a Jewish school all my life.
Anthony Pratt
#45. The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life.
Abraham Cahan
#46. When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.
Bruce Feiler
#47. Everyone takes a turn, and when it gets to me, I shout out what Jewish people say at times like this: "L'chaim!"
"It means 'to life,'" I explain. And as I say it, I think that maybe this is what I was saying a prayer for back in the cathedral. To life.
Gayle Forman
#48. I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.
Antony Sher
#49. The Jewish problem is as old as history, and assumes in each age a new form. The life or death of millions of human beings hangs upon its solution; its agitation revives the fiercest passions for good and for evil that inflame the human breast.
Emma Lazarus
#50. What are we? What is our life? Our goodness? Our righteousness? - THE ASHAMNU, the Jewish shorter confession
Larissa MacFarquhar
#51. Nobody understood what it was like to be black and Jewish ... being different from everyone else just made me a lot stronger.
Drake
#52. In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#53. They say that every Jewish person is supposed to love one black person in his life. I'm glad Lorne Michaels chose me.
Tracy Morgan
#54. There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.
Harold S. Kushner
#55. I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.
Morris Gleitzman
#56. Paul was not a practical Christian who regarded life as superior to doctrine, and practice as superior to principle. On the contrary, he overcame the principle of Jewish particularism in the only way in which it could be overcome; he overcame principle by principle.
Anonymous
#57. You may even have Jews in your midst who did not learn their way of life from us, and did not inherit it from a Jewish forebear. We may have authentic gentiles in our midst: these single protests are of no account; they are extreme and irrelevant variations.
Maurice Samuel
#58. Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.
Robert Winder
#59. In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.
Howard Jacobson
#60. England is no longer controlled by Britons, we are under the invisible Jewish dictatorship, a dictatorship that can be felt in every sphere of life
Nesta Helen Webster
#61. Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret - these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.
Tariq Ramadan
#62. 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
#63. This is the secret of how the Jewish people have created a hedge against chaos in their partnership with God. Sharing creates room in your life for more blessings to come in. Giving creates an endless circuit. You earn, you give, and then you earn more.
Celso Cukierkorn
#64. I'm Jewish and respect the traditions of Judaism, but through all the time I've spent photographing nature, I also have a deep appreciation for the power of the universe. No, not the power of the universe, but just celebrating life.
Louie Schwartzberg
#65. No city in the world, not even Athens or Rome, ever played as great a role in the life of a nation for so long a time, as Jerusalem has done in the life of the Jewish people.
David Ben-Gurion
#66. The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.
Lauren Bacall
#67. I can't imagine writing something that didn't address Jewish themes and questions. It's such a big part of my life, a lot of the way in which I experience the world.
Molly Antopol
#68. It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.
Michael Sandel
#69. Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval
Judith Shulevitz
#70. 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
#71. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?
Pirkei Avot
#72. Life to me is a beautiful gift from from AdoShem that should not be wasted but shared with others. Including amazing revelations that are meant to be seen and meant to be told for such a time as this!
Sipporah Joseph
#73. The United States Jewish population has made many vital contributions in all areas of our society in such ways as helping to develop the cultural, scientific, political and economic life of our country.
Jon Porter
#74. What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past
the whole life of a civilization
but also a major share ofthe Jewish future ... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.
Cynthia Ozick
#75. The Jewish community is all about love and family, which is the most important thing in my life, too.
Gregg Sulkin
#76. The phrase, 'Emancipation of Women' is only an invention of the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped with the same spirit. In the really good periods of German life the German woman never needed to emancipate herself.
Adolf Hitler
