At a young age, I became very aware that not only did my family have to struggle but that families around the country were struggling as well. Also, being Jewish and having lost relatives in the Holocaust, I've always been aware of the meaning of prejudice. These are things that have remained with me throughout my political career.
I think I became funny because I grew up in the Bronx. I was small and weak and Jewish instead of large and fierce and Puerto Rican. You need something.
When you look at food as an ethical issue in the Christian tradition, you don't find very much about it. You don't find, as you do in the Jewish or Islamic or Hindu traditions, a lot of restrictions saying you can eat this but you can't eat that. But what you do find is the idea that gluttony is a sin and that it's something that we ought to be ashamed of.
Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date
My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.
My father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him My mother is British, but she's of French extraction.
There God tells us exactly what is going to happen and scripture tells us that there is going to come a world leader who will initially bring overtures of peace. He will help the Jewish people rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. He will have a new economic system where you don't buy or sell without his mark. Initially, for some, it will look like a good deal because there will be peace, as I said.
Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution of the Jewish problem,' which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.
The people who are pushing Jewish supremacism, Zionism - they are absolute evil and they are crazy. All they know is more power, and so there is a real danger, I should say, for Syria, and a danger for Iran at this point.
I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.
Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.
People think of Jews as the Woody Allen stereotype, the nebbishy kind of thing, but that's not the kind of Jews I know. I know plenty of Israelis and plenty of tough guys that are Jewish. So, I think it makes sense that Jews play metal.
I still think funny, and people young and old still come and see me. That's flattering. The day comes that they stop coming, then I'll know that it's time to retire to the Jewish ranch.
I'm not trying to convert the Jewish people to the Christian faith. . . In fact, trying to convert Jews is a waste of time. Jews already have a covenant with God and that has never been replaced by Christianity.
Zionism demands a publicly recognized and legally secured homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. This platform is unchangeable.
We Gentiles owe our life to Israel. It is Israel who has brought us the message that God is one, and that God is a just and righteous God, and demands righteousness of his children It is Israel that has brought us the message that God is our Father. It is Israel who, in bringing us the divine law, has laid the foundation of liberty. It is Israel who had the first free institutions the world ever saw. When our own unchristian prejudices flame out against the Jewish people, let us remember that all that we have and all that we are we owe, under God, to what Judaism has given us.
The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God is a person. Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in itself any more than did the Jewish Torach. These attributes may be ascribed to the Bible only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power and Light. Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the Man of the book.
The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors won't make it to the nobleman's palace to burn him out and seize the fields. This was the role of Jews in Europe. This has been the role of Jews in the United States, and this is the role of Jews in the Middle East.
The prohibition of L'shon Hara is the Jewish equivalent of the Buddhist practice of Right Speech.
Capitalism and Bolshevism are the two sides of the same international Jewish coin.