Quotes About Ethnicity

The lucky thing was that I was Italian; when the other Italians saw me fight back, they came to my defence.

Unfortunately, you need to keep Italian Roma in Italy.

We're the only ethnic group that says, 'Hey, if you go to jail, it gives you street cred.'

I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American.

When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can't define that as anti-Semitism.

I'm Italian. I wouldn't know how to play a Jew.

I'm a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

I've got the Jewish guilt and the Irish shame and it's a hell of a job distinguishing which is which.

I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.

Hey, I may loathe myself, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm Jewish.

I think of myself as being Jewish and Irish, despite the fact that I'm English.

I'd like it if people thought I was Jewish looking.

My father was ethnically Jewish, but his family converted to Catholicism.

I just think of myself as a comedian, really. I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It's funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I'm not religious at all. I have no religion.

I feel more Jewish than I do Iranian.

I'll tell you now that I hate myself for many reasons, but being Jewish is not one of them.

Are there a lot of Jews in Hollywood? Yeah, there are.

Most of my jokes are racist - usually about the Irish.

I think everyone wants to know why I look like this. These jokes I make about looking Chinese... My mother's from Hungary and my dad was from Canada. There's a lot of immigration in my past.

The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which had earlier been defeated at great cost.

diversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather, that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasize our narrow ethnic or racial identities instead.

The problem, however, was not with the idea of national identity itself; the problem was the narrow, ethnically based, intolerant, aggressive, and deeply illiberal form that national identity took.

But the impact of national identity on state strength is not limited to its coercive power. Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, region, or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert money in that direction.