Jews

"There are some who believe that Soutine deforms his paintings just to deform. That is a grave error. He himself suffers in front of these formless canvases where his marvelous universal staggers like his own insides. At home, he lacerates his paintings in rage. At the dealers, he buys them back to take them away and destroy them."

"I think I would choose Chaim Soutine.. .I've always been crazy about Soutine - all of his paintings. Maybe it's the lushness of the paint. He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There's a kind of transfiguration, a certain fleshiness in his work.. .I remember when I first saw the Soutine’s in the Barnes Collection.. ..the Matisse's had a light of their own, but the Soutine's had a glow that came from within the paintings - it was another kind of light."

"Dear Mrs. Castaing, please come over after midday at 2 o'clock with a white dress without sleeves in order to pose. Because today I will not go to Mrs. Saxe. I am disgusted to do nothing at all."

"I want to show Paris in the carcass of an ox."

"Ah, the giant that is Rembrandt; he's God, he's God!"

"Once I saw the village butcher [in his youth, in Russia] slice the neck of a bird and drain the blood out of it. I wanted to cry out, but his joyful expression caught the sound in my throat.. .This cry, I always feel it there. When, as a student I drew a crude portrait of my professor, I tried to rid myself of this cry, but in vain. When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded. [remark to his friend and biographer]"

"You don't like my painting, you only want to help me. If you had given me one franc for my picture I would have taken it [when M. Castaing discovered his art for the very first time and offered him in advance 100 franc to make a new painting - circa 1917 – 1919]"

"It is the first time in my life that I have not been able to do anything. I am in a bad state of mind and I am demoralized, and that influences me. I have only [made] seven canvases. I am sorry. I wanted to leave Cagnes, this landscape that I cannot endure. I even went for a few days to Cap Martin, where I thought of settling down. It displeased me. I had to rub out the canvases I started.. .I am in Cagnes again, against my will, where, instead of landscapes, I shall be forced to do some miserable still lifes. You will understand in what a state of indecision I am. Can't you suggest some place for me? Because, several times I have had the intention of returning to Paris. [quote in 1929]."

"You have no right to interfere with my art. Your wife is not your property. I need her, in order to finish my picture, I must have her! I will sue you! [the woman returned by persuasion of the Castaings who supported Soutine]."

"..My paintings are a heap of shit, but better than Modigliani, Marc Chagall, and Krémènge [a Russian companion painter]. Some day I will destroy my canvases, but they are too cowardly to do it."

"I never touched Cubism myself, you know, although I was attracted by it one time. When I was painting at Céret and at Cagnes [1919, and from 1923]. I yielded to its influence in spite of myself, and the results were not entirely banal. But then.. .Céret itself is anything but banal. There is so much foreshortening in the landscape that, for that very reason, a picture may seem to have been painted in some specific style [quote in 1927]."

"In an interview late in his life, Ahrne Thorne, the last editor of the Yiddish paper the Fraye Arbeter Shtime said, simply, “Yiddish is my homeland.”"

"Celebrated and marginalized, lionized and trivialized, Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today...... At the height of the language's American popularity in the 1920s, a handful of different Yiddish newspapers circulated hundreds of thousands of copies every day, and Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, in Manhattan, seated thousands of spectators every night. Also, as the primary language of a vast immigrant community of poor laborers and their upwardly mobile children, Yiddish became a crucial part of American politics—at a moment when socialism, anarchism, and communism competed for Americans' votes with more familiar political orientations—and of American business, entertainment, cuisine, and speech. In short, America, famously a nation of immigrants, was the site of many of Yiddish's greatest triumphs—[[Isaac Bashevis Singer"

"For the most part, the histories of Yiddish and its literature seldom give space to its production in Latin America... this anthology documents that Yiddish—or, in one of its Spanish spellings, idish also flourished in Latin America, leaving behind powerfully artistic testaments."

"The language's fate would be entangled with one of the world's most brutal tragedies—millions of those Yiddish speakers were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the Second World War—but it also flowered almost everywhere that Jews settled, before and after the war: Yiddish newspapers and books were published in Montreal and Montevideo, Cairo and Melbourne, Paris and Cape Town (not to mention Warsaw and New York)"

"Yiddish is a relaxed language, extravagantly hospitable to Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German, and French, lush with a vocabulary full of love terms, diminutives, compounds, and neologisms."

"Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears."

"To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning. [...] Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists - rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity."

"At the beginning of the century the vast majority of Jews were Yiddish-speaking Europeans, with Yiddish the main vehicle of secularization, modernization, revolution, and reform. By the end of the century, Yiddish was in daily use only among the so-called ultraorthodox while the growing majority of Jews in Israel spoke Hebrew and the shrinking minority of Jews in America spoke English."

"People ask me often, 'Why do you write in a dying language?' [...] I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it. Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection. I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: "Is there any new Yiddish book to read?" For them Yiddish will not be dead. [...] Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead."

"Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had the limitations of its origins. There were few Yiddish words for animals and birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such voids were filled by borrowing from German, Polish and Russian. Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew, from Aramaic and from anything with which it intersected. On the other hand, it contributed: English - American. Its chief virtue lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions. It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog, of pathos, resignation and suffering, all of which it palliated by humor, intense irony and superstition. It has been said the Yiddish is the only language never spoken by anyone in power."

"The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an acknowledgement of a historical and cultural yerushe, heritage, a link to generations of Jews who came before and to the political activists of Eastern Europe. Above all it was the symbol of resistance to assimilation, an insistence on remaining who we were."

"YIVO’s founding emboldened a highbrow Yiddish intellectual life that flourished between the world wars and soon used the new spelling as its hallmark. Of course, it was already too late. By 1945 the Nazis had killed the majority of the world’s Yiddish speakers. YIVO itself survived only through the efforts of Jewish prisoners, including celebrated poets who were forced by the Germans to loot YIVO’s archives for a Nazi-created “Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question.” Members of this “paper brigade” risked their lives to smuggle out cultural treasures, including documents that scholars had painstakingly collected to record and standardize Yiddish spelling."

"The survival of Yiddish and its culture does not rest on our ability to find the right term for "corn flakes" or "jet lag"; but rather on our ability to find a proper place for yidishe kultur in our lives, a place among other commitments; on our ability to infuse it with our contemporary values and politics learned outside of its boundaries...I want my Yiddish involvement to be rooted in my life, in the present, want it to be infused with my contemporary politics and concerns, with the special quality of Jewish American experience. Di yidishe svive in the American environment. One world, not two. That's what will keep Yiddish alive for me."

"Emphasizing the seemingly more pious stories of Sholem Aleykhem and Peretz, stressing Jewish passivity over action, obedience to tradition over rebellion (and therefore upholding observance), many supporters of Yiddish and Yiddish culture have wrenched yidishkayt out of the active, political and radical context in which it flourished and thereby neutralized and depoliticized it."

"Yiddish was the European language most directly affected by Nazi rule. Although linguistic assimilation had become the norm by the 1930s among Jews in western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, it was slowed in Poland by some of the external and internal forces of exclusion and renaissance alluded to in the previous chapters. Thus, Yiddish was the main language of the ghettos, and of the majority of Jews targeted for annihilation, though most Jews also knew at least one coterritorial language."

"Attempting to meet European standards, Jewish writers exerted tremendous efforts to develop and enrich the Jews' internal languages of Hebrew and Yiddish, all the while combating unfavorable ideas about each. Yiddish was a living language at the time, but even its leading writers Sholem Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz dubbed it jargon (slang). Hebrew, for its part, was considered a dead tongue in need of massive revision. Both languages were invigorated by the extensive enterprise of translation and the expansion of Jewish writing to areas like politics, art, and sciences, which, with rare exception, were not previously found within either canon."

"Hebrew was generally considered the province of men and became associated with the male scholarly elite, in contrast to Yiddish, which became linked with women, common folk, and daily routine."

"already by 1918, the Communists had created the Evsektsiia within its own structure to carry out party policy among the Jews. Regarding the values and institutions of the Jewish community as alien to Marxist ideology and to the new society that was to be based on it, the Evsektsiia took over local Jewish organizations and institutions and set out to eliminate not only the Zionist movement and Jewish religion but also the "bourgeois language" of Hebrew. Yiddish, meanwhile, was allowed to flourish, for it was deemed the language of the proletariat."

"Ironically, in view of later events, the relationships between Germans and Jews in these borderlands were sometimes close to symbiotic. Both groups were more likely than Slavs to live in towns; they also spoke variations of the German language, since the Yiddish of the East European shtetl (literally, 'wee town', identical to the German Stàdtl) was essentially a German dialect, no further removed from High German than the language of the Transylvanian Saxons, even if in Galicia Yiddish signs were often written in Hebrew characters."

"[Yiddish is] a treasure trove for the study of language and culture in general: cultural interaction, semiotics of cultural history, and languages in contact."

"I had the fortune to meet Jacob Marschak. He took me in his hands. There were other good people there, but he was very instrumental in giving me a style. [...] I would say the combination of theory, that is, modeling, with testing of empirical facts. The objective was to develop models that could be tested. Marschak also emphasized the importance of mathematics and econometrics, something that was quite unusual at that time. He was a wonderful teacher. He taught me macroeconomics. We discussed Keynes and Schumpeter. So he helped me to develop both in terms of tools and of ideas. Marschak invited me to a very distinguished seminar, attended by prominent economists such as Oskar Lange, Tjalling Koopmans, and Abraham Wald. Abba Lerner would come now and then."

"There are some issues I'm more conservative on. As a parent, I'm concerned that there are so many young, young, young kids — like 12 years old — that are starting to have sex."

"We treat sex so casually and use it for everything but what it is — which is ultimately making another human being with thoughts and feelings and rights who will grow up to be an adult."

"I started watching reality shows and being horrified at people signing up to be humiliated in front of the entire country. … I saw one show, The Amazing Race, in which people were eating spicy soup and vomiting and crying. Why would you do that? Also, I was fascinated by these actors and actresses who would sign up to be followed around by cameras in their life. You become a celebrity, not because of your work or what you do, but because you have no privacy. I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. It's worth more than that. I'm worth more than that."

"A comparable error was made by Professor Jacob Viner in an important article on laissez-faire in Smith’s economics. He contrasted the mature realism of The Wealth of Nations with the youthful idealism of the Moral Sentiments, and quoted five passages from the ethical work as evidence for his view of it. The first of his quotations was in fact written for the far from youthful sixth edition."

"Jacob Viner used to assign exam questions that showed how Ricardo’s Chapter 2 recognized (in modern parlance): P_2 / P_1 = \frac{\text{marginal cost in labour}_1}{\text{marginal cost in labour}_2} = \frac {1/\left[{\partial {Q}_/\partial{L}_}\right]}{1/\left[{\partial {Q}_/\partial {L}_}\right]} But, Viner insisted, this was compatible with rent’s being 99 per cent of national income and labour’s importance being derisory. Would that more historians of economic analysis had taken Viner’s EC 301 or brooded more on Ricardo’s text."

"At the beginning I was confronted with a choice: move into art or revolutionary politics,... I took the path of art at the age of 18.... I could see this possibility of using the ideas of social change within art."

"I don't want my image to appear in the mass media, since it would detract from the project."

"Facing up to the Nazis and the powers of the Nazi state coloured my life as an artist."

"Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century."

"Auto-destructive art is conceived as a desperate last-minute subversive political weapon used by artists. It is an attack on the Capitalist system and the production of war materials. It is committed to nuclear disarmament and people's struggle."

"In his 60 years of critiquing waste, commercialization, environmental exploitation, and social injustice, he has employed trash, old newspapers, liquid crystals, and industrial materials, and he has even painted with acid. Since Metzger is known for his work’s philosophical dimension, sometimes penning essays related to his art’s themes."

"What is the significance of viewer participation in your work? It has to do with kinetic art. Kinetic art has very much to do with the interaction between spectator and art. In the second half of the ’50s, this became a big international movement. When I moved from painting to connections within media, this came through in the first work, which was an exhibition of found cardboard pieces. It was a turning point for me. The world itself, the industrial fabricated world, could stand for the man-made world of art."

"Da Costa’s ban was harsher than most. When he was banned in 1633, the possibility of atonement was left open, but it was atonement by flagellation that was required. Da Costa refused, but by 1640, after enduring years of isolation, he agreed to go through with the punishment during which he was not only whipped in the synagogue, but, after the display, was forced to lie down at the threshold of the synagogue. Those who exited then stepped on his body on their way out. Unable to bear this humiliation, da Costa shot himself several days later."

"Of what benefit is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but he does not have works? That faith cannot save him, can it? If a brother or a sister is lacking clothing and enough food for the day, yet one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but you do not give them what they need for their body, of what benefit is it? So, too, faith by itself, without works, is dead."

"Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell."

"For the one who does not practice mercy will have his judgment without mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment."

"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace."

"Come, now, you rich men, weep and wail over the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothing has become moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted away, and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh. What you have stored up will be like a fire in the last days. Look! The wages you have withheld from the workers who harvested your fields keep crying out, and the cries for help of the reapers have reached the ears of Jehovah of armies. You have lived in luxury and for self-gratification on the earth. You have fattened your hearts on the day of slaughter."