Simon Schama Quotes

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.

A great part Jewish history was occupied by the simple attempt of Jews to stay alive.

The metaphor of Exodus is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success attracts resentment.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

When we say, “Never Again!”, we actuality don’t mean “sometimes”. We don’t mean “somewhere”. We mean “Never Again!”

With faith and courage, generations of Armenians have overcome great suffering and proudly preserved their culture, traditions, and religion and have told the story of the genocide to an often indifferent world.

I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

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

Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

I wear a muzzuza [Jewish religious ornament] just to remind me that there must never be another holocaust.

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.

Empires came and went while we, the Jewish people, persecuted relentlessly, facing expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust, survived. We survived thanks to the Torah and faith in the Lord.

As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.

Us Jews are nomadic people.

Given the long history of global anti-Semitism and continued calls for the destruction of Israel, it's tough to be a Jew.

For me, why would a Jew want to go anywhere in history ever? I'm only going to have to run.

Jews are living in the past and they can't get over it.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory.

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.

Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn't an ability to identify with a national heritage - you'll never hear a Jew say 'I'm German' or 'I'm Polish,' without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

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

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