Jew[ish] Quotes

“Clearly if Jews aren’t a race they’ve been racialised by centuries of being singled out, massacred, expelled, displaced. It’s obvious anti-Semites have little squeamishness in seeing Jews as a race (often another species), and defining a group in reductive terms they haven’t agreed on is another definition of racism.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“If racism is prejudice plus the power to enforce it, it’s difficult to argue that anti-Semitism functions the same way as anti-black or anti-Asian racism, that Jews aren’t part of the white establishment.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Talmudic study with its focus on textual analysis and the transferable skills it fosters; some cultural emphasis on argumentation”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Culturally, I don’t identify as white, but then who besides racists would?”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“When people go to Paris they take pictures of themselves with the Eiffel Tower or the Sacré-Coeur, never just the monuments on their own. I believe they do this to prove that they exist: not the buildings, but them. Us. People take pictures of themselves under the gate at Auschwitz too and it’s hard not to think there’s a similar instinct at play. Auschwitz is so (I feel queasy saying this) iconic that you don’t expect to ever see it in real life.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“The first thing I can tell you about visiting Auschwitz is that to use the toilets you have to pay two zloty: no zloty, no potty. One of our guides tells us a story, possibly apocryphal, about a survivor who when told about the charge rolled up his sleeve and explained, ‘The last time I was here we didn’t have to pay.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“At the end of the path, carved into the granite, is a quote attributed to Job: ‘Earth, do not cover my blood; let there be no resting place for my outcry.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“It’s banal in the extreme to describe a death camp as chilling but Belzec is unusual (sadly not unique) among the Nazis’ genocidal apparatus, offering as it does a glimpse of a little-known counter-history. Belzec is what the Holocaust looks like in a world where the Nazis succeeded in exterminating the Jews. By the end of 1941, 80 per cent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive; by the end of 1942, 80 per cent were dead.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Did you know that, fleeing persecution in Western Europe, Jewish merchants first settled in Poland in the tenth century? That Polish coins minted in the twelfth century bear Hebraic markings? That by the sixteenth century almost three quarters of the world’s Jewish population lived in Poland? That before the war one in ten Poles were Jews?”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“There’s a great joke about a Holocaust survivor who gets to heaven and tells God a Holocaust joke. ‘That’s not funny,’ God chastises him, to which the survivor shrugs. ‘Yeah, I guess you had to be there.’ The implication being, He wasn’t.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Challenging a conspiracy theorist, even with evidence that appears empirical, will only embolden them.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“For now, then, let’s say this: most Jews are white, but only when it suits others, and right up to the point that we’re not. And it’s this precarity that best encapsulates the Jewish experience of race.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“At a point in history when two thirds of Europe’s Jewry had been exterminated, with their murderers uncharged, it seems reasonable to me that the world needed a Jewish state. None of this is to condone the tragedy of Palestinian displacement nor the illegality and, to my mind, immorality of the settlements, nor to minimise or excuse any of the subsequent tragedies visited upon the Palestinian people who have suffered worst from a cycle of violence that does as much to advance the careers of right-wing ideologues as it does to legitimise Hamas, but it’s important to remember that Israel exists, primarily, because it needed to. Know that every Jew you meet has a member of their family who was forced to leave their homeland because it was hostile to Jews. Anti-Semitism created Israel, and not, as some would have it, the other way around.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“The question it was founded on was a lot less hypothetical. Israel exists because the Holocaust happened, not because it might happen again; once was enough.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“At the time, he struck me as suspect, but not through any political leaning; at sixteen you could’ve put me in a room with Aristotle and I’d have come out claiming he was a chancer.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“In 2004 a Nazi was someone who corrected grocers’ apostrophes or refused you service in their pop-up restaurant. (It hadn’t yet acquired another of its current definitions: someone you don’t agree with.)”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“I saw myself, in part, I suppose, as an ambassador. Jewish people, it was my job to demonstrate, were just like you. We were just funnier and had better hair.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“At weekends we went to Jewish parties, where Jewish teenagers shuffled past Jewish bouncers and drank Jewish fizzy drinks and danced to drum ’n’ bass, waiting for the drop like accountants waiting for April.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Jewish comedy is diffuse and easier to spot than define but is usually characterised by a world-weariness, albeit worn lightly – less as resignation or depression than tacit approval.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“It’s not that all Jews are funny or that only Jews are funny, it’s that there are modes of being funny that are recognisably Jewish.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Jews are never practising, devout or religious (or unreligious) but observant, like private detectives or a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“There is a reason it’s so hard to convert to Judaism: anyone who wants to, by definition, has proven they don’t know what it means.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt. What keeps the vehicle moving isn’t the belief that it will but the heat generated from a thousand simultaneous disagreements. This might sound glib or pedantic but it’s evident in one of Judaism’s most foundational facts. Our most sacred text isn’t the Torah, the purported word of Hashem, but the Talmud, a multi-volume companion text that interprets, expands and comments. Essentially the Talmud is marginalia, a conversation. A beneath-the-line comments section. What Judaism essentially amounts to is a four-thousand-year-old argument.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Each year we sang a song of praise for this. It was called Dayenu, which means It would’ve been enough. If He’d only taken us from slavery – dayenu. If He’d only drowned our enemies – dayenu. It didn’t feel like we were thanking Him for saving us, more holding Him back, pleading with Him to maybe next time consider some diplomatic channels.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“The difference between the Jewish God and the Christian God that the majority of classmates never talked about and weren’t expected to believe in, was like the difference between a Hollywood blockbuster and the European arthouse short it was based on.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Sure, we had mezuzahs (a kind of ornament that contains a page of the Torah) on our door frames, and once a week we lit candles and said three prayers, but who in their right mind would invite a stranger into the place that they slept? Even in shul (synagogue) no one talked about God, or if they did it was in Hebrew, which didn’t count since no one knew what it meant.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“Jewishness wasn’t something I could turn to in a moment of need. If it was anything at all, it was more like an outlook. It was a filter. It was an inflection. A sensibility. A set of shared cultural assumptions. It was . . . It was complicated.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“I hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since the previous millennium and even then it would never have occurred to me to pray in one – as my mum once explained, she didn’t go to synagogue to be with God, she went to be with people.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“That Jews aren’t really a race is an argument beloved by racists and anti-Semites alike, but a rarer, adjacent truth is that Judaism isn’t really a religion. You might think it’s semantics but I’d argue it’s mechanics. Look under the bonnet of most major religions and you’ll find a system of beliefs that’s at least internally consistent (the clue’s in the name: they’re faiths). But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt.”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]

“A Jew without a beard is better than a beard without a Jew’ – Yiddish proverb”
― Matt Greene, Jew[ish]