"Elie Wiesel, in his novel The Testament, wrote, "Between a Jewish businessman from Morocco and a Jewish chemist from Chicago, a Jewish rag picker from Lodz and a Jewish industrialist from Lyon, a Jewish mystic from Safed and a Jewish intellectual from Minsk, there is a deeper and more substantive kinship, because it is far older, than between two gentile citizens of the same country, the same city and the same profession. A Jew may be alone but never solitary..." To which Hélène Elek, a revolutionary Hungarian Jew, replied, "I do not feel Jewish when I meet an orthodox Jew from Poland, for example. I tell myself that I have nothing in common with him. In Hungary, the Jews were assimilated, which I was very happy with. But I was never ashamed of being Jewish... You are a Communist first, and being a Jew comes second. You can be a very good Jew without Judaism.""
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Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesAgnostics from the United StatesNovelists from RomaniaTheologians from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel
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Elie Wiesel
1928 – 2016
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller und Friedensnobelpreisträger
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