We’ve collected the best Jew Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Gilbert Gottfried, Leon Askin, Jean-Marie Messier, Ariel Sharon, Philip Roth. Use them as an inspiration.
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I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.
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Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
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I’m the only one in my family – I’m a practicing Jew – who has attached themselves to religion in a more traditional way.
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I love being Jewish, but I think that our generation is the first generation that crossed that line between being a cultural versus a practicing Jew.
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I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period.
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If a Jewish group sat down with a Christian conservative group, and there was a so-called Messianic Jew at the table, that would be the end of the meeting.
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I’m a Jew.
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Exercise? A Jew doesn’t exercise.
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Judaism is interesting in that there is something there that I think you just can’t understand if you’re not a Jew – it moves into a realm of true mystery.
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God, I just love ‘A Journey to the End of the Millennium,’ by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably ‘Humboldt’s Gift.’
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Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew, our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education, so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age.
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I’m not a practicing Jew but my great-grandparents were. It’s part of our family history.
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I am just a plain Jew; I mean have no training.
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As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.
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I personally would not talk to a Jew for Jesus.
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I’m half Jewish, half Christian. I’m a Jew for Jesus.
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But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it’s happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing – In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.
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Truth be told, for a 21st Century American Jew there is something hollow in the Seder’s liberation story and the commandment to feel as if you were there.
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I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.
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I’m Italian. I wouldn’t know how to play a Jew.
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I didn’t know I was Jewish until I encountered anti-Semitism at the age of 10, when my best friend told me I couldn’t come to their house because I was a Jew.
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President Trump proclaimed ‘America First’ from the inauguration stage. As an American Jew and daughter of immigrants, that slogan makes me shiver.
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In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.
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I am very proud to be a Jew.
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I’m tenacious, I think – I know – and I do also have a quality where if you tell me I can’t do something, if I know I can’t do it I’m the first to raise my hand and say, ‘I can’t do that.’ But there is a big Bronx, New York Jew in me that just says, ‘Really? Really? You think I – yes, I can. I can do it. I can do it.’
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We believe that what we possess we don’t ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don’t give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.
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I’ve never understood people who say they’re not a practicing Jew. You never hear a black guy say he’s not a practicing African-American. What does it even mean?
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Israel has created a new image of the Jew in the world – the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism.
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To Catholic, Orthodox, and some Protestant Christians, communion involves partaking of the physical real presence of God in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. By contrast, the Torah draws the Jew into engagement with God’s infinite mind. Torah learning is the definitive Jewish mode of communion with God.
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I never felt like a good Jew. My mother was not Jewish, and that makes me a non-Jew according to Jewish religious law.
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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.
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Let no Jew, regardless of their circumstances, feel that he or she cannot experience that unique moment of peace when Shabbat begins.
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Because Judaism and Christianity are both covenantal religions, the relationship of the individual Jew or Christian to God is always within covenanted community.
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Jewish sovereignty and governance over our ancestral home are, I believe, important goals that every Jew ought to support.
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Israel was founded as a refuge for the Jewish people, but today it isn’t a safe place. It is safer to be Jew in New York.
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I’m a spiritual person, I’m an America, I’m a Jew, and all of those things influence every breath I take, everywhere I go.
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I’m not really any religion. I still study with Jehovah‘s Witnesses, so I say I’m Apostolic Pentecostal Jehovah’s Witness Seventh-Day Adventist Jew.
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The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.
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I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I’m fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He’s learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there’s a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.
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Being in a rock n’ roll group, or being a musician, it is in conflict in some serious cultural ways with being an observant Jew, but in a conceptual way, for me, they go together real well.
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I’m a Jew. I think of myself as a Jew first and Englishman second.
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Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one’s own volition.
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My four sons all knew I was a Jew, but they were allowed to be whatever they wanted to be. The only thing important to me was that they be good people who help other people, because all religion should try to make you a better person and a more caring person. Whenever religion does that for you, it’s a good religion.
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For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.
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I’m a Persian Jew, and we don’t speak Hebrew.
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My mother was told she couldn’t go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.
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I grew up so conservative. I grew up as an orthodox Jew.
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In terms of defending Jews, I’m a Jew.
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As a Jew, I recognize the importance of Israel historically, liturgically: its place in our history and in our sacred texts. I fully recognize and appreciate that. I just think that, for me, a sole focus on Israel gets in the way of the pursuit of a relationship with God and a more spiritual existence within Judaism.
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I’m not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.
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I’m a traditional Jew with an orthodox background, and it informs much of my approach to science. Of course I think it’s very important that if you have those sorts of backgrounds you don’t impose them on other people as a clinician, of course.
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My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn’t know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer – a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer – and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.
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I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I’m happy to be one – or proud to be one.
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If you’re fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you’re a Jew, you don’t think so much about relationships. People didn’t have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.
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You know you’re a bigot when you can’t take out the word ‘Muslim’ from a sentence you stated and replace it with ‘Jew’ and still have it be socially acceptable.
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I was the only Jew who’d ever been elected, and I don’t know when there’ll be another.
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When we come to the hospital to give birth, we don’t come as a Jew or an Arab; we come as a human being.
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If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.
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I as a Muslim want you, as a Christian, to really be a perfect Christian. I want my Jewish friends to be perfect Jews, to live according to the highest principles of what it means to be a Jew, to be a Christian, to be a Muslim.
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As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.
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It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.
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Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.
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You can take a Jew out of a shtetl, but you cannot take a shtetl out of a Jew.
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I was the kind of Jew who’d be in a bar, somebody would say it’s Yom Kippur, and I’d go, ‘Really?’
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The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism.
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I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.
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The good Jew is ritually observant and resists assimilation, in some sense living apart, never fitting comfortably into American or any other society.
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I’m a cultural Jew, I was raised with it, so I’m still into it, like gefilte fish with kugel.
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I’ve begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.
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I’m a Jew. I’m fascinated by our culture and our history, by what made us the people we are. It influences every breath I take. It informs and guides me. Without it, I’d just be a vacuum.
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I’m vehemently against population transfer. I’m against expelling anyone from his house, ever – whether it be a Jew or an Arab.
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To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world’s worldview.
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Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian – anything but a normal, mainstream American.
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To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one’s sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people.
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The problems that the world faces – from nuclear proliferation to climate change – can’t be tackled by the West alone. They need a coalition of not just West and East, but they need a coalition of Christian and Jew and Muslim.
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It’s tough being a Jew.
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Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner‘s writings, but I can’t accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.
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Anytime someone orders a pastrami sandwich on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.
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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.
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Here’s the thing about Jews in Hollywood. Not to stereotype, but the Jews I know here are the funniest, most self-deprecating people I know. And it’s rare to find a Jew that is actually offended by comedy about them.
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Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
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I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is ‘not ready‘ to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.
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I think maybe I became funny because as a kid, I was a Jew in a town of no Jews, and being funny just instinctively came about as a way to put people at ease around me.
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When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: ‘What’s happened to the grand dream of Zionism?’ I don’t like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What’s wrong with Manchester?
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‘The Chosen,’ if you recall, was based on the Chaim Potok novel and featured Robbie Benson’s persuasive performance as a Hasidic Jew.
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I consider myself more of a cultural Jew; I’m not religious in any way.
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My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.
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What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who’s divorced really have of becoming president?
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