{"quotes":[{"text":"I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.","author":"Aurora Levins Morales","tags":["arab","culture","homeland","israel","jewish","multicultural","multilingual","multireligious","palestine"],"id":618,"author_id":"Aurora+Levins+Morales"},{"text":"I do not go to church. I don’t go to Christian church or Jew church or any other church. I don’t go to church at all. Not ever. A perfect Sunday for me is spent drinking green tea while reading the Sunday New York Times. Yikes! Why don’t I just turn in my Al-Qaeda membership form and call it a day? As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only do I not go to church:I don’t believe in God. How can I say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t believe in God? How can I spend our American currency which pledges “In God We Trust?” How can I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God? Answer: I can’t. It’s a real problem. Don’t get me wrong – I’d like to believe in God. I wish I did, especially if He was the kind of God that thought America was #1. But I don’t, which to many people is the same as not believing in America. Up until recently, I thought those people were lunatics.","author":"Michael Ian Black","tags":["al-qaeda","atheism","atheist","belief","blog","funny","humor","jew","jewish","opinion","separation-of-church-and-state"],"id":1529,"author_id":"Michael+Ian+Black"},{"text":"Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.","author":"Arthur Drews","tags":["christ-myth","christ-myth-theory","christian-gnosticism","christian-history","christian-mystics","church","conversion-of-paul","epistles","epistles-of-paul","facts","gentile","gnostic","gnostic-gospels","gnosticism","gospel-of-john","grosticicm","historical-facts","historicity-of-jesus","historicity-of-paul","jewish","mystics","paul","solomon","synoptic-gospels","tanakh","wisdom"],"id":7279,"author_id":"Arthur+Drews"},{"text":"Strange, how the name Israel, God's own chosen nation, who don't believe Jesus to be the Messiah, sounds almost the same as saying 'is He real?","author":"Anthony Liccione","tags":["israel","jesus","jewish","messiah","nation","rejection"],"id":7804,"author_id":"Anthony+Liccione"},{"text":"Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.","author":"Elie Wiesel","tags":["history","jewish","classic "],"id":12053,"author_id":"Elie+Wiesel"},{"text":"I can't promise you that money will bring you happiness, because it didn't do it for me.But the lack of it, for sure, will bring you unhappiness.Money buys you options and security. Without options and security your soul cannot soar and be free.From my Upcoming book.","author":"Celso Cukierkorn","tags":["celso-cukierkorn","cukierkorn","jewish","jewish-wealth","prosperity","secrets-of-success"],"id":16272,"author_id":"Celso+Cukierkorn"},{"text":"My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.","author":"R.F. Georgy","tags":["arab-israeli-conflict","colonialism","identity","imperialism","israel","jewish","jewish-identity","jews","palestine","palestinian-israeli-conflict","peace-and-conflict","zionism"],"id":16979,"author_id":"R.F.+Georgy"},{"text":"The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.","author":"A.E. Samaan","tags":["eugenics","holocaust","holocaust-history","holocaust-survivors","immigration","jewish","jews","nazi","nazism","racism","roosevelt","scientific-racism","survivors","wwii","wwii-history"],"id":19289,"author_id":"A.E.+Samaan"},{"text":"Muhammad introduced the concept of such Glorious and Omnipotent God in Whose eyes all worldly systems are pieces of straw. Islamic equality of mankind is no fiction as it is in Christianity. No human mind has ever thought of such total freedom as established by Muhammad.","author":"Mawde Royden","tags":["atheist","christian","earth","equality","eyes","fact","faith","fiction","freedom","freedom-of-choice","glory","god","hindu","jewish","justice","kindness","law","life","love","mandate","muhammad","muhammad-pbuh","people","politics","prophets","religion","science","society","struggle","system","tenderness","thoughts","unity"],"id":21344,"author_id":"Mawde+Royden"},{"text":"The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.","author":"Joseph McCabe","tags":["babylonian","christ","copy","egyptian","forgery","gospels","greek","hindu","jesus","jesus-christ","jewish","morality","old-testament","persian","pharisees","plagiarize","sentiments"],"id":28127,"author_id":"Joseph+McCabe"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":111,"pages":12,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}