The Tradition of Judaism, Part III. Quotes about the Jew

I call Heaven and Earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and cursings. Therefore choose life, so that both you and your seed may live, so that you may love the LORD your God, obey His voice, and adhere to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days.

- Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Part III. Quotes about the Jew

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

- Lionel Trilling

The preservation of the Jew was certainly not casual. He has endured through the power of a certain ideal, based on the recognition of a Higher Power in human affairs. Time after time in his history, moreover, he has been saved from disaster in a manner, which cannot be described excepting as ‘providential.’ The author has deliberately attempted to write this book in a secular spirit; he does not think that his readers can fail to see in it, on every page, a higher immanence.

- Cecil Roth, History of the Jews, 1963

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

- Andrea Dworkin

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

- Shylock (The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare)

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

- Golda Meir

It is extremely difficult for a Jew to be converted, for how can he bring himself to believe in the divinity of - another Jew?

- Heinrich Heine

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

- Golda Mei

If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.

- Bernard Malamud

A baptised Jew is a circumcised Christian.

- German Proverb

HEBREW, n. A male Jew, as distinguished from the Shebrew, an altogether superior creation.

- Andrew Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

To be a Jew is a destiny.

- Vicky Baum

I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.

- Jonathan Miller

Israel has created a new image of the Jew in the world - the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism.

- David Ben-Gurio

Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.

- Milton Berle

America, rather, the United States seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

- Edna Ferber

It's time to say that America is a better place to be a Jew than Jerusalem. If there ever was a promised land, we Jewish Americans are living in it.

- Rabbi Jacob Neusner

Is discord going to show itself while we are still fighting, is the Jew once again worth less than another? Oh, it is sad, very sad, that once more, for the umpteenth time, the old truth is confirmed: ''What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews.

- Anne Frank

Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is -- One Who Killed Our Lord. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.

- Lenny Bruce

The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.

- Oscar Solomon Straus

You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.

- Anita Brookner

From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

- Karl Marx

Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew.

- Anton Rubinstein

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

What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?!

The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.

The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.

- Leo Tolstoy

The Jew lends himself easily to Communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew.

- Edmund Wilson

Energy is the basis of everything. Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal… It is the most perpetual people of the earth…

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is certain that the Jew, if he desired-or if they were driven to it, as the antisemites seem to wish-could now have the ascendancy, nay, literally the supremacy, over Europe; that they are not working or planning for that end is equally sure… The resourcefulness of the modern Jews, both in mind and soul, is extraordinary.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

May the LORD God bless you in the name of St. Jude.