"I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing."

From the beginning, the Christian was the theorizing Jew; consequently, the Jew is the practical Christian.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

Embracing and rejecting tradition, bound and liberated by faith, torn between obscurantism and reason, self-assured and self-critical, they were a kaleidoscope of fragments, positions held and abandoned, images formed and shattered, God-fearing Jew, God-denying Jew, passionate and indifferent, hero and villain, yea-sayer, nay-sayer.

Jews are a singular confusion-difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, every pain- nothing is spared them.

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.