Mel Brooks Quotes

If there's no future for Jews in Europe, there's no future for Europe.

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

The Jewish problem

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.

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

I think the thing that I most appreciate now is that stereotypes involving Jewish identity activate fears of persecution that exist in the present day.

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

No matter where you go in this world, you will always find a Jew sitting in the beach chair next to you.

I was not raised a Zionist, but a socialist, as were most Jews before the Holocaust.

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 Jews must realize that their influence in Germany has disappeared for all time.

But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

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.

We are losing the Jewish people in the Diaspora.

It's tough being a Jew.

As a child, I personally didn't really get to know any Jews. I was eight years old when the Night of Broken Glass happened. And Ludwigshafen was purely a workers' city, so we didn't have a very big Jewish community. What I did know about the Jews, I heard from my mother. My mother was very much pro-Jewish.

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.

Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.

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

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

Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties, and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.

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

A lot of Jews are great friends of mine.

Jews have been in Egypt since Biblical times, and Alexandria had once been, at least partially, a Jewish city.

My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.