A Quote by Michael Baden
It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I,who were both Jewish, were going over toidentify the remains of a man who was soanti-Semitic.
Related Quotes
It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I, who were both Jewish, were going over to identify the remains of a man who was so anti-Semitic.
When Superman was originally created, by Siegel and Shuster, they were two Jewish immigrants that were desperately trying to assimilate into America. They were having a hard time because they were Jewish. They wanted to get in to mainstream publishing but they couldn't. That's why they, and a lot of Jewish guys, went into comic books.
As a kid, I heard elders in my family say in passing that Jewish people were consumed with making money, and that they 'owned everything.' My relatives never dwelled on the subject, and nothing about their tone indicated that they thought anything they were saying was anti-Semitic - not that a lack of awareness would be any excuse.
In a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.
Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.
They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.
My father's politics and ideas were, to me, unforgivable. He was a Jewish convert who became very anti-Semitic, and I didn't find the anti-Semitism forgivable.
Most of the Jewish refugees, stripped of their considerable possessions, came to Israel. They were welcomed by the Jewish state. They were given shelter and support, and they were integrated into Israeli society together with half a million survivors of the European Holocaust.
I was very familiar with both actors, as well as Christina Hendricks and Bill Sage, Jimmi Simpson, Polly McIntosh, but the other main actors were new to me. And they were all terrific. Just amazing. Actually, Lowell Northrop optioned Savage Season from me, first book in the series, and I wrote a screenplay.
There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic. No reason at all. I do not know one person in the National Front who committed even the most minor hostile act against a Jewish person or Jewish property. As for me, even though I have been accused of anti-Semitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior. There just are people, organizations, that need an adversary and they want the public to believe that this adversary is dangerous.
I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
My parents decided - because they were not going to teach us anything Jewish at home - to send both me and my sister to a Jewish primary school. So I went to Kerem Primary School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. But, for me, that school really didn't work that well.
The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.
There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told.
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence.
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
Related Authors
Benjamin Disraeli Quotes
British
Celebrity
Bertrand Russell Quotes
British
Celebrity
Bobby Fischer Quotes
American
Celebrity
Fred Rogers Quotes
American
Celebrity
G-Eazy Quotes
American
Celebrity
Garry Kasparov Quotes
Russian
Celebrity
Gary Johnson Quotes
American
Celebrity
Jimmy Carter Quotes
American
Celebrity
Joe Buck Quotes
American
Celebrity
Jonathan Franzen Quotes
American
Celebrity
Ken Wilber Quotes
American
Celebrity
Kim Kardashian Quotes
American
Celebrity
Lord Chesterfield Quotes
British
Celebrity
Paris Hilton Quotes
American
Celebrity
Richard Simmons Quotes
American
Celebrity
Tom Petty Quotes
American
Celebrity