Joshua Cohen Quotes

What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

I knew I wanted to get married and have a family, but it was important that my husband be a Jew; I didn't want to have to explain what Hanukkah is.

My mother's father was Jewish, so she was very conservative. She liked little, pretty music-orchestral-type things.

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

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

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.

The whole point of Israel was to create a place where Jews could live the best life - and liveliest - in accordance with their values.

My father was an Austrian, and he brought some Torahs over to this country, ancient Torahs that were slipped out of Germany.

My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said - “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way - Shakespeare still read even in school.

My Swaraj is to keep intact the genius of our civilization.

If the legends fall silent, who will teach the children of our ways?

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

There is no future for a people who deny their past.

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

The more I travel, the more I see how important it is to each population to see that their history of the good and the bad is remembered by others.

The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

I'm not really a practising Jew but I keep a kosher kitchen just to spite Hitler.

There is less pressure on abandoning native communities: what for? There is nothing to be gained by it. On one hand, there are plenty tempting opportunities of experimenting with identities - being one kind of person today and a different the next day. On the other hand, there is little pressure to include the ethnic identity or religious identity into this mechanism, because now everybody is in a kind of Diaspora today.

I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.