Quotes from Joshua Cohen

Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning's identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified—located elsewhere.

It was only in Palo Alto that I searched "Rachav Binder" and "Rach Binder," got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church's databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions

You are not always a reader, you are occasionally a human.

They were the first who understood that all that was possible was a truth shared by the dominant people, the group or subgroup or family in power.

All of us are born how we are born and suffer how we suffer and if even God can't make us equal who are we to think our laws can?

But the past doesn't have to be the future. That's the point of something you aspire to.

Another thing about couples: they tended to move in together (hiring one crew for both members), but move out separately (hiring one crew for each member)—the lesson being that while making a life together took more toil, unmaking that life took more cash.

But I would submit that even messianism, even false messianism, is more Jewish a discipline than history

The average computer user of good faith who seeks regularly to read the news online now has to exercise the type of critical acumen that scholars of literature have always reserved for the analysis of texts: an intense engagement that seeks out secret meanings, hidden biases, hidden agendas. And what's more, our fictional average computer user of good faith who seeks regularly to read the news online has to do so even as the news reads him, or her, and modifies itself accordingly.

What shocked Yoav was that every couple he'd jobbed for had evinced this divide—straight or gay, irrespective of gender, there was always a leader, a commander, as implacable as an apartment's dimensions, or a circuitbreaker impeding at midwall.

the antagonism between Jewish messianism, which was political, and Christian messianism, which was religious…

Above everyone, though, was the customer, the King of King's who was also the adversary.

perhaps I should just conclude with the antagonism between the belief that history never repeats itself and the belief that it always repeats itself, in the very circular eternity of this table.

Among mankind's greatest faults is his a) kindness, b) generosity, c) fortitude, d) contentment, e) vanity. That was debatable. But the Pythagorean theorem was not, and if the civilian Uri was one side and the soldier Uri was the other, the true him was the hypotenuse, slanted opposite, the squared sum of both.

Sometimes you waited at home in your room so demobilized into quiet that you could just about feel the maskingtape losing its stick and your mortifying teenaged posters of American moviestars who were 50% Jewish and Argentinian-German models who were 100% hot, Uri Malmilian (the football striker), Uri Geller (the mentalist), and Ha'Tzanchanim (the Paratroopers), peeling slowly from the walls.

What's privacy to the employee is security to the boss.

He was dismayed to find that his English—despite years of mandatory instruction in school, months of private lessons with a Bible studies PhD from Exeter visiting Israel to research Christ, repeated encounters with every episode of every season of Sex and the City (subtitled), sporadic encounters with Fast & Furious 1–6 (undubbed), and an aborted reading of the collected works of Sherlock Holmes (abridged)—sucked.

Principal's no different from the rest—he orders and so he is.

Though Yoav wasn't quite able yet to discriminate between weekends and weekdays, American goyim and American Jews—Israel took off Fridays and Saturdays, the States took off Saturdays, Sundays, and apparently the rest of the summer.

The girls had a misguided trust in the circumcised.

After having served the State of Israel for 36 months, or 154 weeks, or 1,080 days, they exchanged their drabs for denims, beat their munitions into passports, and shipped beyond the sea to find their fortunes. To find themselves, or the selves they'd been, and to forget the commands that bound them.

subject" and "genre" are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving

Lift up the hem of verbiage, peek below its frillies – what's exposed? the hairy truth?

Meteorology is the study of how to wear a dress while pointing at Albany.