Mark Kurlansky Quotes

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.

I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.

If there's no future for Jews in Europe, there's no future for Europe.

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important.

Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.

No matter where you go in this world, you will always find a Jew sitting in the beach chair next to you.

You can take a Jew out of a shtetl, but you cannot take a shtetl out of a Jew.

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.

My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam.

I first discovered the Jewish People in America. I have seen any number of Jews, but the Jewish People I never met in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany. This Jewish People that I found in America came from … Eastern Europe generally. These men and women still retain a healthy ethnic feeling. It has not yet been destroyed by the process of atomization and dispersion.

As a Jew, even if you were not born in Poland, the very name, Poland, gives rise to a shuddering in your body and a longing in your heart. This country was the breeding ground for the soul of the Jewish nation, and unfortunately, also grounds to the largest Jewish cemetery.

We are one family, and the connection between all Jews, all over the world, is very important to the State of Israel.

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.

I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.

I'm a Jew. I think of myself as a Jew first and Englishman second.

I was born in a tiny little enclave of terrified Jewish refugees, less than half a million of them, with no clear perspective of a future - hopes, yes, but no clear perspective.

I do have a very large Jewish population, so it's not unusual that I would be interested in being a part of discussions and finding out what's going on in Israel.

My Judaism has always been a great pride with me.

I am very proud of being Jewish.

I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day.

I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.

I'm proud to be Jewish.