After many years of thinking, reading and writing and looking, I came to believe that there are two basic, essential values which are indispensable for humane, decent, dignified life: one is freedom, and the other is security.

Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.

I am not a prophet; I cannot predict what will happen.

Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.

As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.

We have a reversal of a longstanding trend, from rising inequality across nations and constant or declining inequality within nations, to declining inequality across nations and rising inequality within them.

For one to be free there must be at least two.