Jewish Background Quotes

In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple.... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time.... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.

I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.

I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.

I am just a plain Jew; I mean have no training.

I guess you could say I'm kind of Jewish but not really.

I was born Jewish, but I am an atheist. I dont believe in God.

I've never talked about being Jewish in a promo ever. But my name is just so blatantly a Jewish name. It's not like my name is Maxwell Jacob Smith.

I'm Jewish; I'm not religious at all, and I wouldn't pretend to know anything about Catholic politics.

I was always in new schools and had British parents, which was not the norm, and I think there was also... I'm not particularly religious, but I was born Jewish, and I always felt like the outsider because I wasn't Christian or Catholic.

Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger.

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

Judaism is a big part of my background, obviously, and my reality.

I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of that for me. You know, I was brought up strictly kosher, but I - it made no sense to me. It made no sense to me what was happening. So nothing of it means anything to me. Nothing. Except these few little trivial things that are related to being Jewish. ... You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school, and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions.

The first thing to be said about 'Prague Winter,' former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's new book, is that she very wisely chooses to confront early on in it her apparent surprise at learning late in life that she was born Jewish.

I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school... First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what.

I attended five different Jewish day schools as a teenager. I mean, I was trained as a hazan!

I grew up Jewish, became an atheist and a Marxist, and 28 years ago, at age 26, became a Christian.

Now, you may not have known this from my name, Lopez-Cantera, but I'm Jewish.

My mother is Jewish. We celebrated all the Jewish holidays at home.

I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.

I came- though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents - to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.

I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews.

Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background.

The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced.