"I attended the New School for Social Research for only a year, but what a year it was. The school and New York itself had become a sanctuary for hundreds of extraordinary European Jews who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, and they were enriching the city's intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time."

"I was raised largely by Jews. I lived in a world of Jews. They were my teachers; they were my employers. They were my friends. They introduced me to a world of books and ideas that I didn't know existed. I stayed up all night with them - asking questions, arguing, probing, discovering how little I knew, learning how inarticulate I was and how abysmal my education was."

"I hadn't even finished high school, and many of them had advanced degrees from the finest institutes in Europe. I felt dumb and ashamed, but they gave me an appetite to learn everything. They made me hungry for information...."

"One of the great mysteries that has always puzzled me is how Jews, who account for such a tiny fraction of the world's population, have been able to achieve so much and excel in so many different fields - science, music, medicine, literature, arts, business and more...."

"They are an amazing people. Imagine the persecution they endured over the centuries: pogroms, temple burnings, Cossack raids, uprootings of families, their dispersal to the winds and the Holocaust.... Yet their children survived and Jews became by far the most accomplished people per capita that the world has ever produced...."

"Whatever the reasons for their brilliance and success, I was never educated until I was exposed to them."