Eli Yishai Quotes

A great part Jewish history was occupied by the simple attempt of Jews to stay alive.

Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.

The laws of Solon, of Numa of Lycurgus are dead while the even older laws of Moses still live. Athens, Sparta, Rome have perished and have left no children on earth. Zion, while destroyed did not lose its children;;; They no longer have leaders and yet they are a people, they no longer have a country and yet they are citizens.

So much of Judaism is about suffering, survival, and pathos.

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly uptill now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.

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.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

It is not a crime to be a Jew. I am not a dog. I have a right to live. The Jewish People have a right to some part of the earth.

Anyone who makes the life of Jewish people difficult or grievous, as did the Pharaoh, as did Hitler, will be cursed by God

When we say, “Never Again!”, we actuality don’t mean “sometimes”. We don’t mean “somewhere”. We mean “Never Again!”

This is why I am a Zionist: because Diaspora leads to hatred and the Holocaust.

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

Freud was the son of a Jewish merchant who had to move his whole family to Vienna because he couldn't get work. He, as a boy, had to watch his father be mocked and abused on the street for being Jewish... You develop a thick skin and you develop a certain kind of wit to defend yourself.

Being Jewish has always been important to me. I now have 6M tattooed on the inside of my left arm. It's only a half-inch, but every time anyone sees it, they're reminded of the six million who perished, and so am I.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

The metaphor of Exodus is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success attracts resentment.

The disappearance of the Jewish state will not mean the disappearance of anti-Semitism.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.

The Holocaust also shows us how a combination of events and attitudes can erode a society's democratic values.