Quotes About Jewish Music

#1. This American Jewish music is a new experience for us at least consciously.

Neville Marriner

#2. What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.

Pete Townshend

#3. One of the great virtues, apart from the pleasure of performing these works, is that it's opened up an entirely new, expansive repertoire of American Jewish music.

Neville Marriner

#4. Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing ... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are.

Simon Schama

#5. You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.

Justin Welby

#6. With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars. This is how I learned to ride a bike.

Mindy Kaling

#7. I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music.

Janis Ian

#8. It doesn't matter what part I play, I try and commit myself 100 percent.

Steve Buscemi

#9. The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' 'Silver Bells' and 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)' were all written by Jews.

Matisyahu

#10. Nobody believed in the success of the Internet.

Xavier Niel

#11. I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing?

Lenny Kravitz

#12. I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene.

Marc Ribot

#13. You are awareness disguised as a human being.

Oprah Winfrey

#14. Reggae music isn't Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are.

Matisyahu

#15. The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced a lot of holiday music, just not Hanukkah music.

Matisyahu

#16. 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

#17. If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital.

Ken Robinson

#18. I went to America on holiday when I was 17 and, before I knew it, I'd been signed up by an agency and had these obligations I didn't understand, but which I couldn't say no to. This industry chose me. But I did choose to make it fulfilling.

Elle Macpherson

#19. Jewish cantors employ a peculiar art and method of singing in their delivery. They are unexcelled in the art of covering the voice, picking up a new key, in the treatment of the ritual chant, and overcoming vocal difficulties that lie in the words rather than in the music.

Enrico Caruso

#20. In the middle distance, sails were gliding like butterflies, and farther away, ships dotted the mouth of the bay between Awa and Sagami as if brushed in ink in a single flowing stroke.

Haruo Shirane

#21. My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating.

Charlemagne Palestine

#22. I honestly feel that "Murder, She Wrote" stands alone, as many of the other great shows of the past 35, 40 years do. It stands alone, and it's still on. It's still all over the world, "Murder, She Wrote," Jessica Fletcher and "Murder, She Wrote."

Angela Lansbury

#23. My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren't Jewish.

Matisyahu

#24. 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

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

Andrae Crouch

#26. My biggest fear? My biggest fear would be turning into an inanimate object.

Darren Criss

#27. [A Bugatti Veyron is] quite the most stunning piece of automotive engineering ever created ... At a stroke then, the Veyron has rendered everything I've ever said about any other car obsolete. It's rewritten the rule book, moved the goalposts and in the process, given Mother Nature a bloody nose.

Jeremy Clarkson

#28. The Jewish culture - people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music - these are cultural things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. I think that's a good thing.

Woody Allen

#29. My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

Al Kooper

#30. In the oldest chronicles of the times conserved in Hungary, reports will be found of Gypsy music, but never of any other, either Magyar, Slavic or Jewish.

Franz Liszt

#31. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.

Julian Barnes

#32. There's a lot more to see when you're playing and because of the advances in technology it makes room for all kinds of new characters.

Tara Strong

#33. This quality of Jewish folk music [- it can appear to be happy when it's tragic-] is close to my idea of what music should be. The should always be two layers in music.

Dmitri Shostakovich