The Genius of Judaism Quotes

“The theme of competition of victims has found fertile ground in the complexity, the double aspect, of relations between black and Jewish minorities in recent American history.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“L’antisémitisme est un délire très spécial dont l’une des particularités a toujours été, à chacune des étapes de son histoire, de choisir les justes mots qui donneront à sa déraison les apparences de la raison.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, L'esprit du Judaisme

“Before setting foot in Ukraine, I knew that I was entering one of the theaters in which Nazism, the real article”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“I dream that there is, in Jewish culture’s painful experience with sovereignty, a form of virtue, grandeur, and, yet again, genius: a blessed lack of credulousness and the good fortune, though seemingly as often for the worse as for the better, that Israel is still not a state like the others”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“Democracies have an Achilles’ heel. Even the oldest and best established among them have a terrible problem that so far remains without solution. And that problem is the impurity not of their origins but of the mix of people of which they are made. E pluribus unum is the American motto, drawn from Virgil, and it makes the accommodation of ethnic pluralism the most pressing of obligations.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“The thoughts that think themselves within me on days when I’m not thinking. The thoughts that assail me when I recall the haunting finale of Levinas’s Proper Names: the stupefaction of those great “Israelites” who were happy being Jews in Europe, sure of themselves and of their place in that world, prosperous and surrounded by friends, covered with titles and honors, some of them powerful, before the unheralded and unexpected arrival, overnight, of “an icy wind” blowing through the rooms of their houses, “pulling down the wall hangings and tapestries,” sweeping away the “petty splendors” of lives shredded into “rags” that could not mask the distant “baying of the pitiless mob.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“It is a waste of time to track the resurgences of the Catholic, anti-Catholic, socialist, or racist strains of anti-Semitism, when the reactor vessel in which the future explosion is brewing contains a new stew of hate for Israel, obsessive Holocaust denial, and the new religion of victimhood.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“The situation is akin to the construction of a new atomic bomb, this time a moral one, which may fall into the hands of crowds of people who are becoming anti-Semitic without shame or scruple—without, I daresay, even thinking about it.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“Yes, sin-ah, without the final yod that is also one of the letters in the name of God.”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“Anti-Semitism being what it is—a continuously mutating virus, an incurable form of madness”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism

“I remember stony landscapes in which I sensed the mysterious imprint left by eyes that had looked on them for centuries upon centuries before me”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism