“And Yael?” “She’s fine. She’s in Auschwitz.”

(could any two people really be referring to the same thing when speaking about God?),

Because the Jewish Bible, whose purpose is to delineate and transmit Jewish values, makes it abundantly clear that life itself is not the loftiest ambition. Righteousness is.

“My mother is why Kurt Cobain killed himself,”

Just because we’re smarter than those lunatics doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on insanity. The Arabs have to understand that we’ve got some stones, too, but our slingshot’s in Dimona, and the finger on the button is connected to an arm with a string of numbers tattooed on it!”

And when they left, he’d spend twice as long as their visit bemoaning how big-headed and tiny-minded they were, how American Jews were Jews and these Israeli crackpots were Hebrews—people who, given their way, would sacrifice animals and serve kings.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.”

“Bull-merde. You know he had a bottle of Château Sang de Juif 1942 airing out backstage to toast France’s missing piece. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver: “I’m an asshole, asshole! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob: “Our only reliable

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda single-handedly revived Hebrew. Unlike most Zionists, he wasn’t passionate about the creation of the State of Israel so that his people would have a home. He wanted his language to have a home. He knew that without a state—without a place for Jews to haggle, and curse, and create secular laws, and make love—the language wouldn’t