Shabbat Quotes

I get invited to an awful lot of Jewish functions.

My husband is Jewish.

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate - the very act itself - was part of religion.

When you have a Jewish mother who has a very strong Jewish family, it's very ethnic in its practices. Eating brisket, the food and the family and the interconnectedness for better or worse.

I'm a minimalist Jew, but on Friday night, I celebrate Shabbat. At sundown, we light candles, say the blessing, and I don't turn on my computer for 24 hours.

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.

We're not religious, but we've always done Passover and Hanukkah.

The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

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.

Judaism is a brilliant religion, and the main function of Judaism is to learn and read.

People expect someone with the name 'Israel Horovitz' to be a little old man with sideburns carrying a Torah.

I am an observant Jew! Now my secret is out.

In Judaism, there are a lot of rules - everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex.

I'm Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.

Judaism is in all my books.

I'm Jewish. Went to a Jewish school.

You are not practicing Judaism if you celebrate Christmas.

Let no Jew, regardless of their circumstances, feel that he or she cannot experience that unique moment of peace when Shabbat begins.

We were at a kibbutz, and we were at a Shabbat service, and I opened up the prayer book, and on the first page, it said that the prayer book was in thanks to the sponsorship of this family in a temple in Kansas City. For me, it was a moment when I really kind of connected in a real serious way with my personal identity as a Jew.

I went to bar mitzvahs as a kid. I had a lot of classmates who are Jewish.

Just like I am a food snob, I am also a rabbinical snob.

I've always enjoyed the communal side of Jewish life.

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

Just the little bit that I've learned about Judaism, I didn't realize how, dare I say, intense that religion is as far as all of the things that you have to know and remember and the ritualism of it.

I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.