{"quotes":[{"text":"My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.","author":"Elie Wiesel","tags":["death","genocide","germany","history","hitler","holocaust","jews"],"id":2109,"author_id":"Elie+Wiesel"},{"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":"Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["arabs","britain","colonialism","europe","holy-land","irony","israel","israeli-palestinian-conflict","jews","land","palestine","religion","turkey","zionism"],"id":18317,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"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":"The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.","author":"H.L. Mencken","tags":["antisemitism","jews","qualities","race"],"id":29551,"author_id":"H.L.+Mencken"},{"text":"Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["africa","africans","compassion","dh-lawrence","empathy","europeans","internationalism","jewish-question","jews","marxism","mathilde-verne","plantations","prison","race","racism","rootless-cosmopolitanism","rosa-luxemburg","suffering","victims"],"id":34952,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.","author":"David Benioff","tags":["city-of-thieves","history","inspirational","jewish","jews","pessimism","russia","russian","story","world-war-ii","ww2"],"id":42726,"author_id":"David+Benioff"},{"text":"The Book of Life was created as a tool for humans to use to grow in wisdom, knowledge, and power.","author":"Stacy Snapp-Killian aka StacyK","tags":["book-of-life","christians","holy-bible","jesus","jews","lord","repentance","salvation","scriptures"],"id":48368,"author_id":"Stacy+Snapp-Killian+aka+StacyK"},{"text":"Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.","author":"Jonathan Safran Foer","tags":["buddhism","humor","jews"],"id":56386,"author_id":"Jonathan+Safran+Foer"},{"text":"That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.","author":"David Benioff","tags":["city-of-thieves","history","inspirational","jewish","jews","pessimism","russia","russian","story","world-war-ii","ww2"],"id":60731,"author_id":"David+Benioff"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":79,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}