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Antisemitism Quotes

Browse 81 quotes about Antisemitism.

Antisemitism Quotes

“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”

ReligionAtheismSecurityIndiaSalvationIslamIraqDebateGermanyTemplesMiddle EastShakespearePolandNormalityAncestorsJewsEastern EuropeIstanbulEinsteinAntisemitismMoroccoSpinozaTunisiaPragueMarilyn MonroeBudapestJewishnessEritreaArthur MillerKurdish PeopleSynagoguesDesecrationDamascusJewish QuestionMartin AmisRabbisReligious ConversionDavid RieffAnnie NavaskyBar And Bat MitzvahBest ManRobert GoldburgSteve WassermanVictor Saul Navasky
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”

LifeReligionEvilEducationChristianityStudyAtheismReturnEnlightenmentEthicsIslamIntellectThoughtProphecyJudaismExileOld TestamentAssimilationPlagiarism18th CenturyDialecticsMonotheismFree ThoughtAntisemitismRitualsVoltaireGermansRabbisMessianismIsaiah BerlinProhibitionsChabad MessianismHaskalahMenachem Mendel SchneersonMoses MendelssohnRebbes
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.”

ReligionHistoryUnited StatesAtheismIsraelFranceBritainFascismNuclear WeaponsColonialismPalestineArgentinaZionismJewsGentilesAntisemitismIsraeli Palestinian ConflictHebronJewish DiasporaIsraelisAmerican JewsExpansionismLaw Of ReturnBritish JewsFrench JewsHaifa
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it?”

ReligionRaceMothersNationalityJewsAntisemitismIntermarriageRhetorical QuestionsReligious Conversions
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“As the nineteenth century progressed, Austria-Hungary took refuge in reaction at home and adventurism abroad in an effort to contain the centrifugal forces which eventually blew it, and much of Europe, apart. Austria, and Vienna in particular, was the real home of Central-European anti-semitism. Jews wew bottom of the pile. No matter how low you sank, the Jews were still below you, along with the gypsies. At the tail-end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese politician Karl Lueger founded his power base on an anti-semitic platform. Stories of ritual murder by Jewish cabals featured regularly in the Viennese gutter press. It is no accident that Schickelgruber, the faied artist who became Hitler, should have neen the son of a petty official and have spent his ambitions at the butt end of Viennese snobbery.”

ViennaAntisemitismAdolf HitlerAustria Hungary
Book:Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe
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“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.”

FatherPoliticsAwarenessAtheistCommunismGermanyCommunistSympathyHolocaustChristian ChurchJewsCommunist PartyAntisemitismGas ChambersSteinbeckMinisterConcentration CampsJohn SteinbeckThe Grapes Of WrathFinal SolutionChrist KillersCongregational Minister
Author:Phillip Adams
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“It is wrong to say that there was no antisemitism in the Labour Party. But it is also wrong to say that every allegation of antisemitism in the Labour Party was true. Questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in the party remain a dificult, but important and necessary, subject for rational debate. The charge of 'denialism' killed this nuance. It demanded that anyone exercising scepticism be ejected from the political and moral community as anti-Jewish bigots - even when the sceptics in question were themselves Jewish.”

JewishAntisemitismLabour Party UkRational DebateDenialism
Book:The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy
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“And just like that, as if I hadn't said anything at all, the ladies sprang into a conversation about the sinful nature the Jews possessed when killing their Lord Jesus. I didn't know if I was hearing this right because I had become so intoxicated, but I couldn't believe that anyone would talk about religion while on vacation. How could Miss Nebraska think this was a proper environment to discuss something so controversial? One woman went on to say that if she had her way not only would President Bush serve a second four-year term, but she hoped they would overturn Roe v. Wade. This woman was obviously a menace to society and needed to be stopped.”

ReligionPoliticsIgnoranceAbortionAntisemitismRoe V WadeGeorge W Bush
Book:My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
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“A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.”

LiteratureRighteousnessLatinoNovelsHomophobiaMurder MysteryHispanicYaleAntisemitismHolocaust DenialChicanoSergio TroncosoYale UniversityPhilosophy LiteratureHispanic IdentityLatino LiteraturePhilosophical NovelsRighteous Gentile
Book:The Nature of Truth
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“Believe it or not, many people are so fearful of Jewish people – whether they be Jews in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or wherever – they are convinced this tiny minority of 13 million people is secretly ruling the world’s 7.5 billion people AND can effortlessly revise any episode of history AND can fake such well-documented and scientifically-proven historical events as the Holocaust.”

HolocaustAnti SemitismAntisemitismHolocaust DenialHolocaust Deniers
Book:Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories
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“When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended—to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia—this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all—and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours—Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.”

GermanyWorld War IiHolocaustNazismNazi GermanyAntisemitismGeorge OrwellAdolf HitlerHolocaust DenialJewry
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“Whoever it was who said history repeats itself must have been talking about the history of the Jews as there have been numerous genocides of Jewish people throughout the centuries before the Holocaust. Those who belittle their immense suffering are not only heartless, they are also historically ignorant because the 20th Century – bad though it was for the Jews – was not necessarily the worst century for these people. Almost every century since Biblical times has been tumultuous and bloody, and a bitter fight to simply survive against enemies intent on eradicating them.”

GenocideHolocaustAnti SemitismJewsAntisemitismHolocaust Denial
Book:Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories
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“Holocaust deniers will always come up with pathetic lies and red herrings aimed at deceiving and leading the gullible astray. Be it death toll anomalies, gas chamber debates, criticizing Holocaust denial laws, repeating the ancient myth that the “Joooz control the world,” blaming Israel, claiming Anne Frank’s diary is fabricated etc…etc…yada…yada…yawn…the list goes on. Why do the deniers persist? Because they have an agenda – and it isn't a nice agenda.”

HolocaustAnti SemitismAntisemitismHolocaust DenialHolocaust Deniers
Book:Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories
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“Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.”

RacismFascismMulticulturalismGlobalizationWhite SupremacyNazismAntisemitism1969Race TheoryMiscegenationImperialistEthnic NationalismInterbreedRacial Purity
Book:The Mass Psychology of Fascism
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“But Anja. I hear Anja's voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being alone and humiliated. I remember, too, the fat little boy hiding in the bathroom. And I see this man, Ariane. I see this evil man, Ariane. He laughs everyday still. He has had years of laughter. He has triumphed over the screams of others, he has triumphed with blood on his hands. And he laughs still. God has cursed us! He has either cursed us or He was never here to begin with. We've pretended God was here for our own sanity! That's the truth! We've pretended evil is punished and good is rewarded. A perfect scheme!”

MurderRighteousnessHolocaustLatinoRight And WrongHispanicAntisemitismHolocaust LiteratureSergio TroncosoYale UniversityJews And Judaism In EuropeRighteous Gentile
Book:The Nature of Truth
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“A circular letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to all German authorities abroad shortly after the November pogroms of 1918 stated: "The emigration movement of only about 100,000 Jews has already sufficed to awaken the interest of many countries to the Jewish danger.... Germany is very interested in maintaining the dispersal of Jewry... the influx of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the opposition of the native population and thereby forms the best propaganda for the German Jewish policy.... The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrating Jews is to the country absorbing him, the stronger the country will react.”

ImperialismRefugeesAntisemitism1967Rights Of Man1918StatelessnessPogrom
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic. The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany, questioning the validity of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a career depended upon an “Aryan” physiognomy (Himmler used to select the applicants for the SS from photographs) and the amount of food upon the number of one’s Jewish grandparents, was like questioning the existence of the world.”

TotalitarianismNazismAntisemitism1967HimmlerRace TheoryPost FactualTotalitarian Propaganda
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“you’ll have people hijacking the Palestinian struggle as a chance for bashing the Jews, like European neo-Nazis who demonstrate against the occupation of Palestinian territories or the Iraq War. It’s important for the left to keep them apart from the legitimate struggle for the rights of the Palestinians; however, saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is a well-known tactic of intellectual dishonesty. (Interview in Forward)”

PalestineIraq WarZionistJewishZionismNazisAntisemitism
Author:Carlos Latuff
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“When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years.”

ChurchCatholicSsAntisemitismExcommunication
Author:Sam Harris
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“Except for Christianity, the Nazis reject as Jewish everything which stems from Jewish authors. This condemnation includes the writings of those Jews who, like Stahl, Lassalle, Gumplowicz, and Rathenau, have contributed many essential ideas to the system of Nazism. But the Jewish mind is, as the Nazis say, not limited to the Jews and their offspring only. Many “Aryans” have been imbued with Jewish mentality—for instance the poet, writer, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the socialist Frederick Engels, the composer Johannes Brahms, the writer Thomas Mann, and the theologian Karl Barth. They too are damned. Then there are whole schools of thought, art, and literature rejected as Jewish. Internationalism and pacifism are Jewish, but so is warmongering. So are liberalism and capitalism, as well as the “spurious” socialism of the Marxians and of the Bolsheviks. The epithets Jewish and Western are applied to the philosophies of Descartes and Hume, to positivism, materialism and empiro-criticism, to the economic theories both of the classics and of modern subjectivism. Atonal music, the Italian opera style, the operetta and the paintings of impressionism are also Jewish. In short, Jewish is what any Nazi dislikes. If one put together everything that various Nazis have stigmatized as Jewish, one would get the impression that our whole civilization has been the achievement only of Jews.”

JewsNazisAntisemitismNational Socialism
Book:Omnipotent Government
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“Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other.”

ProgressRacismFollyProgressiveMulticulturalismAntisemitismAnti White
Book:The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism
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“The greatest and the most oppressive empire on earth is the Anglo-American empire. By that is meant the British Empire, of which the United States of America forms a part. It has been the commercial Jews of the British-American empire that have built up and carried on Big Business as a means of exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations. This fact particularly applies to the cities of London and New York, the stronghold of Big Business. This fact is so manifest in America that there is a proverb concerning the city of New York which says: 'The Jews own it, the Irish Catholics rule it, and the Americans pay the bills.”

RacismJewsIrishAntisemitismJehovahs WitnessesJwWtbts
Book:1934 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses
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“I say the word " Anti-Semite" is vulgar and pedantic : that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews has nothing to do with any supposed "Semitic" race which probably does not exist any more than do many other modern hypothetical abstractions, and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter. The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man who hates Jews.”

RacismJewsAntisemitismRacialism
Book:The Jews
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“The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.”

PoliticsHuman RightsIsraelActivismGenocideMiddle EastDictatorshipPalestineAl QaedaSymbolismGazaHamasAntisemitismIsraeli Palestinian ConflictHezbollahGaza WarProtocols Of The Elders Of ZionFreedom Flotilla Ii
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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