I'm Jewish. I've always had a thing where it's okay to dance with the devil, just don't become the devil. Even at my peak, I never went too over the top.
I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
In the Jewish tradition, there is at the same time Jerusalem in the heavens and Jerusalem on the ground. Jerusalem is a living city, but also the heart, the soul of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.
If I had been prime minister, I would have offered apologies to the Dutch Jewish community without hesitation. This would refer both to our government's attitude during the Second World War and to the very late postwar discovery that the restitution process had been poorly conceived.
Chabad is very important because without Jewish education, Diaspora Jewry would disappear.
Arabs don't have to be the victims of the Jewish war between Lieberman and Netanyahu.
The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don't really think about it as a regular person.
Jewish people are tough people. They believe in something and believe it really strong, and I find it fascinating that a small country like Israel is as powerful as it is.
I am proud to state that every national Jewish organization we support enforces non-discrimination practices around sexual orientation and that more than 70 percent have written policies in place covering gender identity and expression.
I don't really go down one path. I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist, or a Catholic or a Christian or a Muslim, or Jewish. I couldn't put myself into any organized faith.
I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.
My mother was a Jewish General Patton.
The burden is on the Jewish majority in Israel to prove that the definition of their country as Jewish and democratic is not a contradiction.
When I grew up, I thought I was Jewish. Now I don't consider myself Jewish. I consider myself a Kabbalist.
I couldn't lie anymore to my kids telling them that they are equal citizens in the state of Israel. They cannot be equal because in order to fit in and to be accepted and to be a citizen in Israel, you need a Jewish mother.
I come from a very athletic family. But I didn't have the typical Jewish sports heroes. I mean, like lots of Jewish kids I admired Sandy Koufax. But I didn't look up to him as the one person who gave me the desire to push on and succeed. My brothers did that for me.
Nobody cares if you're black, white, straight, gay, Christian, Jewish, whatever it may be. When you step on that field, you're a member, in my case, the 49ers. That's your job, your occupation.
I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music.
If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site or, for that matter, Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill - no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion.
The president is the face of the State of Israel around the world: not a representative of a specific ideology but of the collective creativity and history of the Jewish people.
I'm Jewish, I can say it. We're storytellers. We were the moneylenders... Therefore we tell great tales to get what we need. I love Jewish men. They make the best husbands.
I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing?
I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.
After '45, Ben Gurion started to organize the Zionist movement and the conference in Baltimore. At this convention, they decided that the helm of the Zionist movement has to be a Jewish commonwealth... a Jewish commonwealth!
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
I very much favor democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.
The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.
I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I'm fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He's learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there's a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.
My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.
My grandmother on my father's side, a nightclub singer, was a Jewish refugee from Prussia who ended up in Jerusalem, where she met my grandfather - a British army officer. I remember as a child having bowls of chicken soup made by her. There were lots of interesting components, like feet and necks.
It is essential that Christians understand this: Every Jew - secular, religious, assimilated, left-wing, right-wing - fears being killed because he is Jewish. This is the best-kept secret about Jews, who are widely perceived as inordinately secure and powerful. But it is the only universally held sentiment among Jews.