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" Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept. "
Simon Schama
Jewish
Silence
Surprise
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" It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers. "
Simon Schama
Eating
Debt
World
" It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present. "
Simon Schama
History
Past
Curiosity
" History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative. "
Simon Schama
Brave
Need
History
" The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too. "
Simon Schama
Early
Around
Late
" In the Einstein way, I can't believe in a universe that doesn't have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation. "
Simon Schama
Believe
Universe
Nature
" At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn. "
Simon Schama
Out
Ugly
Thought
" Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are. "
Simon Schama
Saying
Music
Story
" Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. "
Simon Schama
Light
Child
World
" I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled. "
Simon Schama
Stylish
New
More
" Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish. "
Simon Schama
Together
Religion
Freedom
" Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry. "
Simon Schama
Poetry
Start
Feel
" The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible. "
Simon Schama
Thought
World
Research
" You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French Revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn, and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess. "
Simon Schama
Sleeping
You
Revolution
" We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality. "
Simon Schama
Earth
Dead
Cheating
" Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between. "
Simon Schama
Adventure
Living
Story
" My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God. "
Simon Schama
God
College
Mother
" The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me. "
Simon Schama
Want
Death
Golf
" I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor. "
Simon Schama
Write
Repair
Study
" I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory. "
Simon Schama
Identity
Community
American
" I find it very hard to write about Jewish history. "
Simon Schama
Hard
History
Jewish
" St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn't. "
Simon Schama
Christian
Early
Impossible
" The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise. "
Simon Schama
United States
Republic
British
" Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers. "
Simon Schama
Someone
Quality
Your
" Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as storytelling, you remember it in food, and you remember it in the family. "
Simon Schama
Food
Home
Place
" I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury. "
Simon Schama
Need
Arts
More
" The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book. "
Simon Schama
Poetry
Life
Book
" Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a braised mushroom, other than a lot of braised mushrooms. "
Simon Schama
Mushrooms
Off
Nothing
" The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. "
Simon Schama
Moving
True
Bible
" A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin. "
Simon Schama
Memory
Human
History
" In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well. "
Simon Schama
Egypt
Endurance
Go