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When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.

Bruce Feiler

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Bruce Feiler
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 25
Writer
Savannah
Georgia
Lives
Jew
Thought
Families
Better
Burden
Receding
Many
Everyday
Cheered
Would
Generations
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Life
Growing
Persecution
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Religion
Jews
Faith
Jewish

More quotes by Bruce Feiler

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Adam and Eve - and especially Eve - are victims of the greatest character assassination the world has ever known. Eve is not secondary. Eve, if anything, is the great initiator in the story. She's the first independent woman. For me, rediscovering that Eve was the greatest bad**s women of all time was a revelation.
Bruce Feiler
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I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.
Bruce Feiler
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Learning to heal ruptures is a key to having a successful relationship. Adam and Eve model that for all of us. In Hollywood love is a choice, and you live happily ever after. In real life love is a series of choices. You make the choice to be with a person over and over again.
Bruce Feiler
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Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't.
Bruce Feiler
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The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.
Bruce Feiler
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I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.
Bruce Feiler
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I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me.
Bruce Feiler
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Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.
Bruce Feiler
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Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.
Bruce Feiler
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Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.
Bruce Feiler
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It's like they say in the Internet world — if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that.
Bruce Feiler
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Social media is fine, but we need to put the phones down and look somebody in the eye. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community. Especially talk to the one you love. It's all about connection. It's hard, but it's ultimately what gives us meaning in the world.
Bruce Feiler
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I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.
Bruce Feiler
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Moses is our true founding father.
Bruce Feiler
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You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.
Bruce Feiler
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I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.
Bruce Feiler
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After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.
Bruce Feiler
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Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.
Bruce Feiler
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One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?
Bruce Feiler
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I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.
Bruce Feiler