As a Jew Quotes

“This is the problem with Ḥanukkah/conversionist antisemitism: it can turn into Purim/eliminationist antisemitism, and what starts as Jews not being allowed to live fully as Jews ends with Jews not being allowed to live at all.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Although we can’t prove that the events in the Torah actually happened, we have archaeological evidence, a stone slab from the thirteenth century BCE, that mentions the Israelites. And at some point, likely in the twelfth century BCE, the Israelites arrived in the Promised Land, then known as Canaan and later referred to as the Land of Israel.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Chosenness wasn’t a reward for being awesome. It was an obligation the Israelites accepted, a high standard to which they agreed to be held. For centuries to come, Jews believed that if they didn’t fulfill that obligation or meet that standard, if they failed to follow the laws of the covenant they’d accepted, they would be punished accordingly.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“But while they offered detailed analyses of Israel’s flaws, some of which I agreed with, I was struck by how uninterested they seemed in thinking through the details of what would happen if Jews were stripped of power in Israel. They never provided a convincing answer to the obvious question of how, exactly, Jews without a state of their own would be safe in a part of the world where so many people wish to annihilate them.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Another 150,000 Palestinians did not flee, remaining in the new state of Israel. They were granted full Israeli citizenship, though they were required to live under Israeli military rule until 1966 as a security measure. The Arab nations that had been eager to wage a war of extermination against Israel proved less eager to help the Palestinians made homeless by that war…neither Jordan nor Egypt enabled them to create an independent state in those territories.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“When Jews lack a state of their own and have nowhere to go when persecuted, millions of them can be murdered by their fellow citizens while hundreds of millions of people worldwide do nothing to help.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Jews do not proselytize because we do not believe that others have to join our covenant with God to be acceptable or saved. We’re fine to let others do their thing, as long as they observe the basic laws that are considered part of the covenant God made with all human beings after the flood (no murdering, incest, etc.). We simply ask that others”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“perpetuating colonial rule21 is a luxury of sorts”—it’s an effort to expand the empire, not an existential struggle to survive. That’s why anti-colonial struggles work: it’s not worth it to colonialists to fight decades of bloody wars to keep a colony. If they face enough resistance, they’ll simply return home. Jews in Israel have faced decades of bloody wars and plenty of terrorism too. But they had no empire, no home to which they could return.*”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Relying on incident counts can be like trying to measure humidity with a bucket, as if it were rain. You can wind up with an empty bucket and a lot of people proclaiming that it’s all in your head. Even as you stand before them drenched in sweat and feeling suffocated, they may still insist that you’re overreacting, even making it all up.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“many Western European Jews were undergoing a process of assimilation. For millennia, wrote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Jews believed they were “a people loved by God25 . . . chosen, different, holy”; but, he continued, “At some stage Jews stopped defining themselves by the reflection they saw in the eyes of God and started defining themselves by the reflection they saw in the eyes of their Gentile neighbors.” And their neighbors thought they were disgusting.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“So when I think about what Jews are, it’s clear that “religion” is not the right word. This is Judaism’s Western category problem: Jews do not fit into the primary categories—race, ethnicity, religion—that we often use to sort people today. Jews emerged long before these classifications, at a time when, as Rabbi Jay Michaelson notes, “nation, religion, tribe, and land25 were all imbricated together.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Chaplains understand spirituality broadly to include not just someone’s religious beliefs, but how they find meaning, comfort, courage, and connection, particularly in times of crisis.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“I also worry that this anti-Zionism-versus-antisemitism debate sometimes misses the point”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“In the Six-Day War in 1967”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Zionism had anti-colonial elements. Those early Zionists were resisting the oppressive demands of the powers in the countries where they lived: demands to embrace Christian-inflected cultures”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Again and again”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Jews do not proselytize because we do not believe that others have to join our covenant with God to be acceptable or saved. We’re fine to let others do their thing, as long as they observe the basic laws that are considered part of the covenant God made with all human beings after the flood (no murdering, incest, etc.). We simply ask that others let us do our thing.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Finally, I understood: the covenant is not a call to personal faith or obedience, but to collective action and transformation—to transformation through action—and to holy separation. This is the Jewish mission in the world, the reason why we are here.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“It wasn’t until I considered the Torah in its historical context that I finally understood: the Torah is essentially one long protest—a polemic really, an epic critique, page after page of pure trolling—directed at the powerful empires of its time, Egypt and Mesopotamia.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Rather, the Torah is the story of who Jews are, why we exist, and what kind of society and world we should strive together to build.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“There is no word in biblical Hebrew that simply means “obey,”* which is good because many of the people in the Torah are not particularly obedient.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us

“Of the ancient Near Eastern civilizations in existence at the birth of the Jewish people—the Hittites, Ammonites, Edomites, and so many others—none remain, lost to history long ago. But Jews are still here, and I believe Jewish civilization still has something important to say, to us and to the world.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us