When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.

I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.

Tibet's a tragedy. It's an insult to human decency.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

I would not like to draw analogies, with the past.Governments, leaders, intellectuals, mainly intellectuals who should know the ethical dimensions, are so important, so essential to culture, religion, to civilization, and to our own lives. And that means what? It means not to be indifferent, not to stand idly by. That is a biblical commandment that we are committed.

I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.