I married a Jewish lady, and we're raising our son Jewish, and since I'm not Jewish the whole thing is just a mystery to me. I leave it to her, actually, because it's just a great mystery.
I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.
When I was kid, yeah, my family, my parents wanted me to marry a Jewish girl because that was what they taught their children, and thought it would be an easier life for me to raise a Jewish kid. And I have a Jewish wife, I have a Jewish kid. They seem pretty happy about it.
I got into the situation where I was extreme right. It turned out that my mother is Jewish, my grandmother is Jewish. I am Jewish. So I can't hate Jewish people.
I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.'
We don't like to say that [my wife was Jewish] because her mother was Jewish, which means she was Jewish. So don't imply that my wife was a shikse.
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.
Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai B'rith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish.
If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish.
We keep a Jewish household and are raising our daughters Jewish.
I am humbled and honored to receive the Genesis Prize, recognizing not just my professional achievements and my desire to improve the world, but also my commitment to my Jewish identity, Jewish values, and Jewish culture.
One reason which I find particularly fascinating about Israel is this. There is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. There is a Jewish culture, a Jewish religion, but there is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. The Jews were a component basically of two civilizations. In the Western world, we talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition and you talk about the Judeo-Islamic tradition because there were large and important Jewish communities living in the lands of Islam.
I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn't trust anybody outside. You'd bring someone home, and the first question was, 'Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?'
I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.
There's two identity markers I'm sure of, and one is, I'm Jewish. And the other is, I'm a writer. There's just no arguing with either thing. I'm just Jewish.
I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.
Jewish communities in the diaspora are very important to Israel and we are open to a dialogue with them. It is bitter for us to see the process of assimilation, the mixing of Jewish and non-Jewish. But when it comes to the relations of state and religions, the basics have not changed since Rabin's times.
Just as every Jewish couple gets married under a canopy open on all four sides - a replica of the tent modeled for us by Abraham and Sarah - so must Jewish communities keep our tents open. This is the true source of our longevity and resilience.