Quotes About Jewishness

It was in her sense of education, more than any other, that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us. She admired the way Jewish parents raised their children to be scholastic standouts, insulating them from a potentially harmful and dangerous public school system by clustering together within certain communities, to attend certain schools, to be taught by certain teachers who enforced discipline and encouraged learning, and she followed their lead.

Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews.

many saw their antifascism as a more important mark of personal identity than their Jewishness

This is my world as a Jew, Heshie. Yiddishkeit. You like to think I've abandoned being Jewish. You think I've lost my identity. But we come from different traditions. You don't even see my Jewishness because it doesn't look like yours.

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

Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers....These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A.

In the traditional Russian and Nazi definition of Jewishness, where parentage and surname counts as much as religious and cultural affiliation, such a view is plausible. But what was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, or Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even spoke Yiddish, let alone knew Hebrew.