Jewish Experience Quotes

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

I was not raised a Zionist, but a socialist, as were most Jews before the Holocaust.

My Kashubian family, like the Jews, are people who were born and live in border areas and were suspected by the Nazis and by the Communists of being disloyal.

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.

I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.

I don't regard Jews as a class. I regard them as a privileged misfortune.

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

The early years of my life were very, very traumatic. It was scary, because any child knew that death was sort of lurking around Europe as far as Jews were concerned.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

If you are a Rothschild, a Rosenwald, a Gimbel, or even a Waldbaum, growing up Jewish can be a rich experience. For the rest of us, it could be just so-so.

I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

My childhood wasn't very happy. It's a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town.

The majesty of the American Jewish experience is in its success marrying its unique Jewish identity with the larger, liberal values of the United States. There is no need anymore to choose between assimilation and separation. We are accepted as equals.

For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn't just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case.

It's tough being a Jew.

I believe Jews are compassionate people because of what we've suffered. We must not put that suffering onto others.

I grew up as one of the few Jews in Edison, and I had people tell me they hated me because of my religion.

Sometimes you get the cynical person saying, 'Do we really need another book set in Nazi Germany?' But I think you just have to ask, 'Is this a story worth telling?'

It's interesting when you're part of a group - the Jews, to be exact - that the world has had such problems with.

You can easily see why the experience of Jews would be helpful if you're looking to get action on religious persecution.

Some of the metaphors you find in 'Wicked' - how those in power can exploit fear in others to maintain their power - I think, as Jews, we've seen that historically on more than one occasion.

In both Israel and America, Jews have experienced unparalleled freedoms, achieved great economic success, and exercised appropriate degrees of political power.

My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.