Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?
Under Hitler it was the entrepreneurial and professional classes who were the first victims of Nazi boycotts and exclusion. Today it is Israel, the most powerful symbol of Jewish national resurgence in two millennia.
When Jesus calls his disciples 'brothers' and 'friends', he is contradicting general Jewish usage and breaking through into a new concept of brotherhood which is not tribal, but open to any person.
I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.
The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.
I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I'm your classic American mutt.
I love having that creative discussion where, at the end of the day, you both feel better for having done it. Maybe it's a typically Jewish thing, where you sort of go at each other.
I'd work to make it hip again to spend time in our fabled and fabulous land. But with a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, I would probably be better suited as mayor of New York.
I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.
There was one occasion when I was very young - eight years or seven years old - that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our pla...
The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and ...
Through these offices it was my privilege to get to know almost every Jewish person, and those whom I did not come to know through these offices I came to know through love and a desire to know my brethren, the members of my people.
I do love the idea of ritual. I'm a very ritualistic person. I have to wash my face twice, and on the second wash before I rinse, I brush my teeth, then I rinse, then I floss, then I put on moisturizer. I'm ritualistic. Jewishness is very ritualistic...
I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Nev...
Elaine Dickinson: Would you like something to read? Hanging Lady: Do you have anything light? Elaine Dickinson: How about this leaflet, "Famous Jewish Sports Legends?"
There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.
What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.
Look, the hard-line Jewish position is based, to this day, on the idea that the Palestinian Arabs somehow or other will either accept third-class status, or they will pick up and go away. Now, this isn't happening.
People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she's still going to expect a passel of grandkids.
The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.
