Jewish Life Quotes

Estonia is proud of the fact that the country today has a flourishing and happy Jewish life.

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

Hebrew word for "charity" tzedakah, simply means "justice" and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.

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

In the '80s, we were living in the U.S.S.R., where anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Being a Jewish person in the Soviet Union was not easy. Not that I remember any of that - I was barely old enough to chew back then - but for my parents, both Uzbekistan-born Jews, life was a struggle.

Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.

When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.

To outsource your memory to machines - which is what many of us do with regard to our use of search engines - seems to me to be fairly antithetical to the basic qualities of Jewish life that have kept the Jews alive for so long.

There is no difference between Muslim life, Christian life or Jewish life.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

For I firmly believe that Jewish life, indeed any communal life, can only be organized according to democratic principles.

The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.

The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine.

… as happy as Jews in America

Before I became an orphan of the Holocaust my early family life was stable. I grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt, and I was in a household with two loving parents and an adoring grandmother who spoiled me. My mother helped my father in their wholesale business and they went to synagogue every Friday.

My six handbooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events mostly followed the trajectory of my adult Jewish life.

I have a wonderful synagogue, fantastic rabbi and cantor and membership, and they just enrich my life every day, and I learned so much from helping to grow our synagogue, grow our membership, and meet the needs of such a diverse population.

One cannot live on potatoes alone. It is said that one wants bread with potatoes. And when there's no bread, a Jew takes his stick, and goes through the village in search of business.

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.

I frankly encountered more anti-Semitism in the northeast than I did in Oklahoma, but not much either place. Anti-Semitism is not part of my life.

Since 1985, I have written about contemporary Jewish practice and the Jewish community.