Top 96 Quotes About Being Jewish
#1. The only advantage I have found in being Jewish is that I can be openly anti-Semitic.
Kirk Douglas
#2. As a matter of fact, part of being Jewish is the whole question of what it is to be a Jew.
Peter Riegert
#3. I'm comfortable being old ... being black ... being Jewish.
Billy Crystal
#4. I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I'd say my religion was more surfing than Judaism - that's what I spent most of my time doing.
Julian Schnabel
#5. I'll tell you now that I hate myself for many reasons, but being Jewish is not one of them.
Clive Sinclair
#6. I was always a little unsteady in my self-belief. Then there was the Jewish thing. I love being Jewish, I have no problem with it at all. But it did become like a scar, with all these people saying you don't look it.
Lauren Bacall
#7. 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
#8. San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it's my kind of politics. It's like being Jewish in front of Jewish people.
Elayne Boosler
#10. I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany.
Peter Eisenman
#11. The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don't really think about it as a regular person.
Liev Schreiber
#12. I'm very proud of being Jewish. It means I have a good work ethic, and you get Jewish humour and you're allowed to tell Jewish jokes.
Daniel Radcliffe
#13. No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
Adam Mansbach
#14. Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor ... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
Adam Mansbach
#15. The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.
Marge Piercy
#16. 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
#17. I think of myself as being Jewish and Irish, despite the fact that I'm English.
Daniel Radcliffe
#18. Most women writers don't interest me because they're hung up with being a woman, they're hung up with being Jewish, they're hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating.
Patti Smith
#19. Women who have managed to get successful normally have had to carve out pretty much their own route for doing it, because there are few roadmaps for how, as a woman, you become successful. You think about having to do it yourself, you carve your own way. Does that relate to being Jewish?
Noreena Hertz
#20. Being Jewish and having lost relatives in the Holocaust, I've always been aware of the meaning of prejudice. These are things that have remained with me throughout my political career.
Bernie Sanders
#21. I noticed that people were craving a way of reinterpreting tradition and of being Jewish without joining a synagogue.
Jill Soloway
#22. Child: Why on this night do we eat Hot Fudge Sundaes? Adult: To remind us that being Jewish is like having your birthday every day!! Plus they're delicious!
Jon Stewart
#23. I enjoy being Jewish, but I'm an atheist ... I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world.
Warren Mitchell
#24. Being Jewish has always been important to me. I now have 6M tattooed on the inside of my left arm. It's only a half-inch, but every time anyone sees it, they're reminded of the six million who perished, and so am I.
Joan Rivers
#25. That's what being Jewish is: summoning the means to question who you are and how you have behaved. Have you remained alight in the darkness of cruel wishes,..? Have you forgiven? Have you lived up to the standards of your one and only heart?
Emily Franklin
#26. 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
#27. I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you're more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish.
Walter Isaacson
#28. Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.
Hannah Ware
#29. It is not only a matter, I believe, of religious observance and practice. To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it
Golda Meir
#30. I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of - well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late '50s, early '60s - that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.
Barney Frank
#31. Being Jewish means loving something that's gone. Your parents, your grandparents, the place they came from. Jerusalem itself. Creation.
Michael Davidow
#32. Yet what choice did he have? Nothing about this war was fair. Nothing about being Jewish was fair, The only question that counted was whether he wanted to live or not, and he did.
Joel C. Rosenberg
#33. I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.
Adam Mansbach
#34. As a Jew I am aware of how important the existence of Israel is for the survival of us all. And because I am proud of being Jewish, I am worried by the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the world.
Steven Spielberg
#35. I am very proud of being Jewish. I went to a Jewish school all my life.
Anthony Pratt
#36. I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It's funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I'm not religious at all. I have no religion.
Sarah Silverman
#37. Dear, she's not tolerant at all of our being Jewish," said Mrs. Rosen. "She has no problem with it that requires any.
Michael Kroft
#38. Maybe there's something about the outsiderness of being Jewish that makes for a fiery feminist type.
Hanna Rosin
#39. 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
#40. As a journalist, I've always treaded carefully about being Jewish and caring a lot about Israel and having that not become too big of an issue that could affect my journalism. But I also don't think it's essential to my Judaism, as I think it might be for some other people.
David Gregory
#41. There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told.
William Shatner
#42. 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
#43. Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.
Betty Friedan
#44. Beyond being Jewish, I've always found myself to be very much in tune with spirituality.
Paula Abdul
#45. Is obviously high time that the Jewish conception of nature, at any rate in regard to animals, should come to an end in Europe, and that the eternal being which, as it lives in us, also lives in every animal should be recognized as such, and as such treated with care and consideration.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#46. Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America's diverse Muslim population - that they are foreign and exotic and un-American - was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago.
Reza Aslan
#47. 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
#48. The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.
Alan Dershowitz
#49. I am appalled by the great injustice being perpetrated by those Jewish organizations that engage in anti-Christian bigotry.
Daniel Lapin
#50. As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.
Rowan Williams
#51. Jewish nationalism means no more than recognition of the peoplehood of Israel, and of the propriety of that people's being a religio-cultural group in America, a nationality in Eastern Europe, and in Palestine an actualized nation.
Milton Steinberg
#52. 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
#53. Every civilization:
Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, all of them understood that LEARNING was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING, LEARNING was NOT to MAKE MORE MONEY;
It was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING.
Hamza Yusuf
#54. After the Germans and Austrians, the Rumanians were the biggest killers of Jews. They were more inclined to inflict beatings and torture, or to rape, the officers being worse than the men since they selected the prettiest Jewish girls for orgies.
Paul Johnson
#55. The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.
John Podhoretz
#56. Being half Jewish, we grew up with Christmas trees but had Jewish ornaments.
Gina Rodriguez
#57. My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.
John The Apostle
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. I remember as a kid being asked if I was Jewish or Irish. I said, like the glib little 15-year-old I was, 'You can be both.' Feeling very pleased with myself. Before they smacked me.
Lenny Abrahamson
#61. The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered ... This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us.
Ariel Sharon
#62. Four years ago in speaking of a Jewish nation one ran the risk of being regarded ridiculous. Today he makes himself ridiculous who denies the existence of a Jewish nation.
Theodor Herzl
#63. The Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable hatred toward all nations, and revolts against all masters; always superstitious, always greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous - cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity.
Voltaire
#64. The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge's chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists.
Ernst Zundel
#65. 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
#66. What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?
Douglas A. Blackmon
#67. I've always had to deal with being biracial, even in music. When I came on the scene, I'd go to these record labels, and they'd say things like, "Lenny Kravitz. That's a weird name." I'm brown-skinned and I've got these dreadlocks and I've got this Jewish last name.
Lenny Kravitz
#68. Being raised a Jew in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, my religious training emphasized learning the Hebrew language and Jewish festivals, history, and culture. We also remembered the Holocaust and supported the newly formed Jewish state of Israel.
Rick Strassman
#69. It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.
Alan Dershowitz
#70. Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.
Susan Faludi
#71. Israel desperately needs peace if it is to come anywhere close to being the 'light unto nations' of Jewish dreams.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
#72. Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
Arthur Hertzberg
#73. Someone will say to me, Oh that's so Jewish to interrupt. I say to myself, okay, is that code for you hate Jews? Or am I just being paranoid?
Jill Soloway
#74. Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.
Mordecai Richler
#75. There are times when folks will point out certain characteristics I have, like me being an interruptor, and attribute them to my Jewish identity.
Jill Soloway
#76. The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.
Jerry Leiber
#77. If I, as a human being and artist represent anything in the world, it is my Jewish people, and therefore Israel is the only state on our planet which I want to represent with my art and all my public activities, no matter where I live.
Evgeny Kissin
#78. I am a judge born, raised, and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#79. Nobody understood what it was like to be black and Jewish ... being different from everyone else just made me a lot stronger.
Drake
#80. I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.
John Shelby Spong
#81. I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.
Idina Menzel
#82. 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
#83. I try to take people at face value and then beyond, taking them out of face value and out of the category of being Black, Latino, Asian, White, Jewish, Muslim or Christian or Atheist, none of that matters to me.
Immortal Technique
#84. I have no religion, but I can't escape being extremely Jewish ethnically - that is, culturally. In other words, I'm not religious, but I worry and I'm neurotic. And I'm very good with money.
Sarah Silverman
#85. I am one of the happiest people I know. And that's a weird place to have arrived at from being a depressed Jewish kid.
Debra Winger
#86. Although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly. And I think that that is what's best about Israeli democracy.
Barack Obama
#87. Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving ... if you're not handsome and you're not athletic and you're not rich, there's still one last hope with girls, which is being funny.
Mike Nichols
#88. I always believe that my greatest audience will come from 70-year-old Jewish men and Jewish women, but that's me from my experience of going to High Holiday services and being adored by the women with free candy in the back.
Mark Feuerstein
#89. Religion triggers a lot of emotions in me, most of which stem from being raised Jewish in a very Baptist community in the South. I didn't believe any of it from an early age - the clubby quality of whatever religion or church you belonged to, Judaism included. It just struck me as foolish.
David Cross
#90. The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#91. Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore?"
"I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt."
"What guilt?"
"The guilt of being innocent victims.
Don DeLillo
#92. The families in positions of great financial power obsessively interbreed with each other. But I'm not talking about one Earth race, Jewish or non-Jewish. I'm talking about a genetic network that operates through all races, this bloodline being a fusion of human and reptilian genes.
David Icke
#93. 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
#94. In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.
Slavoj Zizek
#95. The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.
Lauren Bacall
#96. 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
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