It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if ...only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present dis...tress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...when I have formed the sounds, said the words out loud, those who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only, suddenly... felt it had been revived. As my tongue, mouth, lips, throat, lungs physically pushed Yiddish into the world--as I, a Jew, spoke a Jewish language to other Jews--Yiddish was very much alive. Not unlike a lebn geblibene, a survivor, of an overwhelming catastrophe, it seemed to be saying 'khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober 'khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... many American Jews have a morbid tendency to exaggerate their handicaps and difficulties. ... There is no doubt that the Jew ...... has to be twice as good as the average non- Jew to succeed in many a field of endeavor. But to dwell upon these injustices to the point of self-pity is to weaken the personality unnecessarily. Every human being has handicaps of one sort or another. The brave individual accepts them and by accepting conquers them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clea...rly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The word "conservative" is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smu...g, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, "If you, tho...ugh a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging ...toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »