You aren’t describing academia so much as what it’s like to be the father in a family of women.”

“My work is different because my sources are different, yes. But I’d attribute that difference less to my own abilities than to the ignorance of my colleagues. What you call a linguistic barrier, I’d call anti-Semitism.”

Judy was cruel. She had that smart cruelty to her of someone who’d gotten what she wanted. And she’d gotten it the fairest way, through suffering.

Now that Israel exists, however, the days of the Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish Question still remains to be answered it’s whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.”

how the theoretical “what is fairness?” differed from the practical “what is fair?” and how fairness could often be at odds with equality (for example, fairness might take individual achievement into account, but equality can never). We looked up “equality” and “equity,” I had her look up “egality”; we quarreled about whether it was “equitability”

The Jews had to found an army first and a country second; the country would follow from the army, this was his belief.

If enough Americans could be inspired by the dream of a Jewish State, they would vote enough politicians into office to make that dream come true, with treaties, aid agreements, protection from the Soviets.

Unlike the Zionists of Vienna, Budapest, and Switzerland, he refused to wait for the world to “give” the Jews a homeland, whenever and wherever the great powers pleased; God had already “given” the Jews a historical homeland in Palestine; it was there, it was waiting for them (it was Netan-yahu); all they had to do was take it.

This Zionism was the creation of Eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement shtetls, a movement of the religious poor who sought to settle the land that God had promised to their ancestors, the ancient Israelites.