The suggestion that Jews were selected from among all nations of the earth to be God's chosen people suggested a kind of group arrogance, especially …

- Israel Shenker

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored.

- Israel Shenker

A [Jewish] woman could not divorce her husband, but she could petition for divorce, and the religious courts could force him to grant the divorce on …

- Israel Shenker

At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next lingered for a moment, then…

- Israel Shenker

God's greatest blessing is children. The only problem is that you have to support them. It's a problem, not a disadvantage.

- Israel Shenker

Theology emerged not as a course of knowledge but as a feast of homily and imagination and exaggeration in which every man could find his image and h…

- Israel Shenker

Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning va…

- Israel Shenker

In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness.

- Israel Shenker

Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identif…

- Israel Shenker