Joel Grey Quotes

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.

Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.

I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.

I remark that Providence seems to make every Thing to work for Mortification to the Jews & to prevent their incorporating into any Nation; that thus they may continue a distinct people.

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.

I know from the stories of my grandparents and great-grandparents the real struggles and discrimination that Italian Americans faced when they first immigrated to America.

Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.

Freud was the son of a Jewish merchant who had to move his whole family to Vienna because he couldn't get work. He, as a boy, had to watch his father be mocked and abused on the street for being Jewish... You develop a thick skin and you develop a certain kind of wit to defend yourself.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

Like other important immigrant communities, the Jewish experience in the United States represents the ideal of freedom and the promise and opportunity of America.

There are a lot of people in Beverly Hills who come from the Middle East, who are very much a part of the Beverly Hills fabric, and their kids grew up with the privileges of Beverly Hills. And yet they still have to deal with a lot of the prejudice against them for being foreign-born.

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.

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.

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.

I think Jews are the smartest people in the world.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

As a first generation Jewish American, I have witnessed firsthand Jewish immigrants who have come to this Nation in order to create a better life for themselves, their families, and future generations.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

I remember my dad came from Ireland and Scotland, and so he carried with him the fear of poverty. So when I wanted to break loose, it kind of made him very nervous.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

The Jews are a race and not a religion. My goal was not to persecute the Jews but to enlighten Gentiles to put them on guard.

The Jew does not wish to be isolated. He fears being alone, without allies.