Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.