Jewish Customs Quotes

I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.

I went through a little hippy dippy program at Brandeis and was bat mizvahed by the rabbi who married my parents. We celebrated the High Holidays and had the traditional Rosh Hashanah dinner.

Therefore it is right that also the Jews, who are in all the world under us, shall maintain their ancestral customs without hindrance and to them I now also command to use this my kindness rather reasonably and not to despise the religious rites of the other nations, but to observe their own laws

I'm Jewish, but not overly religious, and have certainly never formally observed the Fourth Commandment, other than via the tradition of wearing white on Friday nights at summer camp, which never seemed to dovetail with the fact that Fridays were also the night for grape juice.

It is an old custom amongst Jewish children, to become war-like on the 'L'ag Beomer.' They arm themselves from head to foot with wooden swords, pop-guns and bows and arrows. They take food with them, and go off to wage war.

Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

I met Evan Goldberg at bar-mitzvah class. It was called tallis and tefillin.

My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.

The Jews spend at Easter.

Jews don't drink much because it interferes with their suffering.

I grew up happily immersed in Jewish culture and community.

It's not what the rabbis say that defines Jewishness but what we Israelis do every day - our actions and our values.

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.

I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents.

When I was growing up, I didn't know who Jewish people were, what it was to be Jewish.

When my children were growing up, we began every family meal - which included breakfast and dinner every day - with a prayer. We are Jewish and so it was the prayer over bread, when we were having bread, or the catch-all prayer for everything when we weren't.

A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt.

I know what it means to be Jewish, and I don't think someone who wasn't Jewish would really understand.

I was kosher until I had my Bar Mitzvah, and I parlayed officially becoming a man into telling my father I wanted to eat cheeseburgers.

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

The great number of the Jews furnishes us with a sufficient cloud of witnesses that attest the truth of the Bible.

Since my daughter is only half-Jewish, could she go in the water up to her knees?

Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.