Simon Schama Quotes

In both Israel and America, Jews have experienced unparalleled freedoms, achieved great economic success, and exercised appropriate degrees of political power.

I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

I think all the history of the Jewish people is about adaptation.

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

I don't think I have accomplished what I still have to accomplish. There is one thing that I would like to do, and that's to bring security and peace to the Jewish people.

The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.

There is no Polish culture without Jewish culture.

My family is from Russia and Poland. We never had that thing with the German Jews.

It's interesting when you're part of a group - the Jews, to be exact - that the world has had such problems with.

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

The Jewish problem

The Jews are the most formidable and most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.

It's tough being a Jew.

Israelis are the total Jews.

I am very proud of being Jewish.

I am a Jew, and I'm convinced that Israel is the homeland.

I've been working with Jews for over 20 years.

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.

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.

You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.

When I was growing up, I didn't know who Jewish people were, what it was to be Jewish.

I'm no more or less Jewish than any other Jew. Israel has survived because we haven't forgot our Judaism, but there are some Israelis who did forget.

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

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.