Jewishness Quotes
England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
Philip Roth
You have Mel Brooks and your Marx Brothers and your Larry David. So it's affected it enormously and really not at all. I don't think I've ever done anything comedically where the joke of it had to do with Judaism and Jewishness, but there's definitely a proud tradition of comedy in the Jews.
Andy Samberg
Can the seventeenth-century rationalist, who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western philosophy, be considered, by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker? Can he even be considered a Jew? Benedictus Spinoza is the greatest philosopher that the Jews ever produced, which adds a certain irony to his questionable Jewishness.
Baruch Spinoza
Last but not least, the factor which prevented Trotsky from succeeding Lenin was his Jewishness. Trotsky hated to be reminded that he was a Jew. Whenever anybody come to him asking him to help other Jews, he would explode in anger and insist that he was not a Jew but an ‘internationalist.' On one occasion he said that the fate of the Jews concerned him as little as the fate of the Bulgarians.
Richard Pipes
The operation itself is the social act that enabled the patient to come to terms with the immutability of his Jewish body. No matter what is done, the body will reveal itself to be that of a Jew. This crushing realization drives the patient beyond medicine for therapy. He eventually breaks with his racial-religious identity and converts to Catholicism, the ultimate form of passing in Catholic Vienna. Aesthetic surgery did not cure the patient of his Jewishness, it only masked it. Baptism became the answer....
Sander Gilman
Burchill divides up the chosen people into Good Jews (hardliners, Israelites) and Bad Jews (liberal Jews) with the enthusiasm of an antisemite. Hilariously, she sets herself up as the Jewishness Police, railing against Jews who are not Jewish enough; and one of those, it turns out, is her local rabbi, Elli Tikvah Sarah. Burchill rails against the rabbi for, in this order: ignoring a bottle of champagne Burchill gave her in favour of elderflower wine made by the rabbi's girlfriend; "canoodling" with said girlfriend ("a Sapphic free-for-all", sneers the heretofore not exactly prudish Burchill), and advocating a dialogue with Islam.
Burchill doesn't include this in the book but, according to Rabbi Sarah, Burchill emailed the synagogue's congregants railing that "your rabbi respects PIG ISLAM". Aww, being used as a launchpad for a British columnist's racism – we're living in the Promised Land now, fellow Jews!
Julie Burchill
Like the monsters, the enchanted-islands story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children's home that had taken in my grandfather must've seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn't really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they'd be hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.
Ransom Riggs
[T]he Jewish Nigger, Lassalle... It is now quite plain to me - as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify - that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses' flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow's importunity is also nigger-like.
Karl Marx
