Top 64 Quotes About Jewish History
#1. The easiest way for Americans to make sense of Chinese history is to compare everything to Jewish history. There's an analogue for everything. Torah: Analects. Curly sideburns: long ponytails. Mantou: bagels.
Eddie Huang
#2. There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.
Romain Gary
#3. About the last Exodus:
Virtually every one of us Russian Jews had to choose between "to leave or not to leave" as it has been many times during the last two thousand years of Jewish history.
Leo Pevsner
#5. I'm a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humor.
Peter Eisenman
#6. I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.
Simon Schama
#7. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.
Hannah Arendt
#8. Jewish history has been tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. Our major vice of old as of today is parasitism. We are a people of vultures living on the labor and good fortune of the rest of the world.
Samuel Roth
#9. Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
#10. Presently, the Commission for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History has been brought about to encourage and sponsor a variety of historical activities that advance our understanding of the American Jewish experience as it marks this milestone anniversary.
Jon Porter
#11. Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.
Simon Schama
#12. If the main thing the next generations know about Jewish history is that we were persecuted and suffered, they will lose sight of the tremendous heritage of Jewish culture, theology, and wisdom.
Deborah Lipstadt
#13. Written with grace and thoroughly researched, One People, One Blood is an ethnography with a lot of heart that also sheds new light on a fascinating and fraught chapter in recent Jewish history.
Ruth Behar
#14. Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.
Elie Wiesel
#15. In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
Elie Wiesel
#16. It's very clear from Biblical history and Jewish history that Jewish monotheism wasn't developed in an instant, that it became gradually the accepted norm. But undoubtedly, Jewish ancestors were polytheists.
Robert Winston
#17. Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
Simon Schama
#18. Jewish history is never simply about the Jews, but always about their relationship with the rest of society.
Abigail Green
#19. Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
Maya Angelou
#20. It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.
William Howard Taft
#21. Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
Daniel Libeskind
#22. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
David Benioff
#23. When the Temple was destroyed, the Jewish people faced a crisis unlike any other in its history. For centuries, the sacrificial system had served as the primary medium of atonement before the Almighty.
Meir Soloveichik
#24. Without a Jewish state, the iron truth of history is that the Jewish people sooner or later become even more vulnerable to the next wave of anti-Semitism.
Jack Schwartz
#25. I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction
the Messiah.
Elie Wiesel
#26. If you research history, I think we are all Jewish. It's the original culture.
Amar'e Stoudemire
#27. ...the history of the Broadway musical is the history of short Jewish men yelling at each other.
Jack Viertel
#28. There were several key American scientists that favorably reported on Nazi eugenics after visiting Hitler's Germany in order to provide it cover.
A.E. Samaan
#29. I'm glad that Jewish kids are taught about the Holocaust and other stories in our history, but I wonder if there are ways that this information and narrative can be transmitted differently.
Jill Soloway
#30. We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.
Jon Stewart
#31. We regard it as our duty to declare that Jewish Jerusalem is an organic and inseparable part of the State of Israel, as it is an inseparable part of the history of Israel, of the faith of Israel.
David Ben-Gurion
#32. As a product of history and faith, Jewish Americans have helped to open our eyes to injustice, to people in need, and to the simple idea that we ought to recognize ourselves in the struggle of our fellow men and women.
Barack Obama
#33. Over the course of history, many Jews have ultimately embraced Christianity - some forcibly, some in order to advance in non-Jewish society, some out of wholehearted belief.
Meir Soloveichik
#34. 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
#35. Jews have been the most successful and productive nation in history.
H.W. Charles
#36. Israel and our vicinity is an area that traditionally has little industry. The area is known for history, it's known for religious stories, it's known a bit for agriculture, but ... neither was the Jewish population thinking about export industry, nor the Arab or Palestinian population.
Stef Wertheimer
#37. It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
Simon Schama
#38. 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
#39. If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.
Shlomo Sand
#40. Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.
Elie Wiesel
#41. American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.
Erik Larson
#42. Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.
David Novak
#43. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#44. My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
Donald Tusk
#45. Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.
A.E. Samaan
#46. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.
A.E. Samaan
#47. At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
Clive Sinclair
#48. To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
#49. Through educational programming, Jewish American History Month will help raise the awareness of a people, their history and contributions. It will help combat anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that is on the rise and that unfortunately still exists in our Nation.
Jan Schakowsky
#50. To die,
so young to die.
No, no, not I,
I love the warm sunny skies,
light, song, shining eyes,
I want no war, no battle cry,
No, no, not I.
Hannah Senesh
#51. I am not conventionally religious, but I am an ongoing student of the Old and the New Testament and the history of the Jewish people and the birth of Christianity.
Robert Littell
#52. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.
Thomas Harding
#53. Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.
Elie Wiesel
#54. In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.
Reza Aslan
#55. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a 'pilot community for interracial living.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#56. I think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.
Reza Aslan
#57. I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.
Ralph Webster
#58. Freemasonry is a Jewish establishment, whose history, grades, official appointments, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from beginning to end
Isaac Mayer Wise
#59. Stella Suberman's Suggestions for Further Reading
The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi, by Edward Cohen
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, by Eli N. Evans
Insecure Prosperity, by Ewa Morawska
The Slow Way Back, by Judy Goldman
Stella Suberman
#60. The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.
Thomas Harding
#61. 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
#62. Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.
Yuval Noah Harari
#63. Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#64. You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.
Tony Judt
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