I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.

I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn't be able to vote and are inferior to whites.

The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.

Once the Roman Catholic Church in the West became the church most closely connected with the state, the Roman Catholic Church did not recognize the validity of any religion other than its own.

Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion.

People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.

Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way.