Arthur Hertzberg Quotes

• What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!

  Arthur Hertzberg

• Nobody is in the process of making any changes that we can be specific about.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they’ve cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• Look, the hard-line Jewish position is based, to this day, on the idea that the Palestinian Arabs somehow or other will either accept third-class status, or they will pick up and go away. Now, this isn’t happening.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• I write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• I think anti-Semitism is the meal ticket of the organizations that fight it.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• I regard Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and all other forms of fundamentalism, as the enemies of God – and I hope you’ll quote me on that.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• I don’t know where Bush is going – yet. But, Sharon obviously – I wrote somewhere in the last several months, that Sharon has adopted, essentially, the position of the Labor Party: that the Palestinians are here to stay.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• I argue that the Talmud is about the constant struggle to understand.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• How can a rabbi not live with doubt? The Bible itself is a book of doubt.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• But, I know enough people in that court, through the years, to know one thing: There’s always somebody who surprises you, who rises above what they thought they appointed him for, and stays with the separation of powers, and with the right of the law to decide.

  Arthur Hertzberg

• A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers.

  Arthur Hertzberg

Arthur Hertzberg (15)

Birth:	9th June, 1921
Death:	17th April, 2006
Nationality:	American, Polish
Profession:	Activist, Professor, Theologian

About

Arthur Hertzberg was born in Lubaczów, Poland. He was a Conservative rabbi and prominent Jewish-American scholar and activist. Hertzberg's love of Judaism and the Jewish texts was at the core of his life as a rabbi, scholar, educator and Jewish communal leader. He participated in the 1943 Rabbis' march, walked with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1963 March on Washington and Bloody Sunday at the height of the American civil rights movement, and also served as an intermediary between the American Jewish Community and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Hertzberg graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1940, received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1943 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1966. He was the Bronfman Visiting Professor of the Humanities at New York University from 1991 until his death in 2006.

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