Jason Fuchs Quotes

My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.

I really didn't grow up religious, and I didn't grow up acknowledging my Muslim identity. For me, I was a British Pakistani.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

I did go to cheder and was a bar mitzvah. We were members of an Orthodox synagogue, although we were not religious. My grandfather was Polish. He came to Ireland in the '30s.

Madea is a cross between my mother and my aunt. She's the type of grandmother that was on every corner when I was growing up.

We are a mixed marriage, so our kids were raised with a little less Judaism than I was raised with.

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.

I go to church for the cultural element. It's where you go to see Greek people once a week. It's real important to me, and I hope my children see they're part of something bigger than just this family.

Oddly enough, my mother was born in Southampton. I have roots in Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor. My grandfather, her father, Stefano Rullo, when he came from Naples, he went to Pennsylvania and worked coal mines.

I grew up in a very religious family, so that was never going to leave me. I just accepted it over the years. Although I'm not religious myself, it is so much a part of me. It's a part of my history, a part of my tradition and my culture, so I don't want to just throw it away and leave it behind, because it's made me who I am today.

I came here with something in me that I inherited from my folks. So I'm going to do something called life and times.

Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

I was talking to my grandpa last Thanksgiving. He pulled me aside and was like, "This Thanksgiving is the 150th for the Vaughn family in Chicago." I was like, "Cool, whatever," but I think when you have a culture like that, you should have a real appreciation for it. My family's been there forever and I don't want to leave.

I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration... "Joy and Pain" - sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

I grew up with very little religious training. Actually, like, none. I think what Jewishness I felt as a kid stemmed almost entirely from this atrocity in our family tree.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

My parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.

In my little town, Sighet, which is in Romania, Hungary-Romania, but a real shtetl, a little [Jewish] village - and we began with the Chumash [Pentateuch], probably at age four.

I was pretty Irish Catholic Jersey, the middle of the line.

Being "Jewish" is way stronger culturally than it is religiously.

I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own.

I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.