Jacob Neusner Quotes

Tchernichovsky , or Simon Dubnow or Achad  HaAm, or the German neo – Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, one is obliged to recognize that for these thinkers (regardless of how little they prayed, or how little observed…) the center of their life was the Jewish people…The new Jewish intellectual, although he still works against the sacral models of scholar, sage and prophet, has turned these models away from Judaism and into self-sustaining ideological postures.

In close to two decades since World War 11, we have witnessed the greatest single synagogue boom in the whole of Jewish history in the Diaspora.

Thus, the insistence on Jews remaining Jews, which may take the religiously indifferent forms of liking Yiddish jokes, supporting Israel, raising money for North African Jews, and preferring certain kinds of food, has a potentially religious meaning…Dead in one, two or three generations, it may come to life in the fourth.