If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

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.

It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

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

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.