Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
God’s Attributes
The Lord came down in a cloud; He stood with him there, and proclaimed the name Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed: “The Lord! the Lord!a God compassionate and gracious, slow to…
The Way to a Man’s Heart ("The Settlement" Cook Book)
The Settlement Cook Book, first published in 1901 as a pamphlet, soon became a mainstay of American domestic culture and was published in more than forty editions before its final publication in 1991…
Pastoral (Ein Karem Landscape)
Israel Paldi was a member of the Land of Israel movement, a group of post-impressionist artists who, in the 1920s, broke with the conventions of the Bezalel School. Some, like Paldi, became well-known…
Landscape II
Aviva Uri was considered one of the most important Israeli artists of the twentieth century. Influenced by abstraction, surrealism, and Chinese and Japanese drawing, she developed a unique style that…
Paratroopers at the Western Wall, June 7, 1967
Perhaps the most iconic photograph of the Six Day War is this one, of three Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall shortly after its capture by the Israeli army on the third day of the war. A few…
On the Way
They are taking me to the town to go to school—let them take me. I will show them how I will learn there; and they ought to know this already, haven’t they seen and also…
Wedding Sofa
This Biedermeier-style sofa from Danzig, with birch veneer over pine, may have been commissioned on the occasion of a marriage. The oval on the seat back contains an image of clasped hands, and the…
Jewish Folklore in the Middle Ages
The science of Folk-lore tries to explain in a scientific way the origin, growth and development of popular literature; it discovers the sources from which the popular fancy has drawn its materials…
On Prayer
Of all religious phenomena, there are few which, even when considered merely from the outside, give such an immediate impression of life, richness and complexity as…
The Bar Mitzvah Discourse
In this lamplit scene, the brightest spots are the mother’s dress and the white tablecloth on the table. (The mother and a maid at right, coming out of the kitchen, are the only women in the room.)…
Return of the Prodigal Son
The Christian parable of the prodigal son, from Luke 15:11–12, was a favorite subject of artists from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. A son squanders his inheritance and is reduced to…
National Autonomy for the Jews?
In 1905 a group of Jewish Social Democrats left the party in Galicia in order to found their own organization of Jewish Social Democratic workers. The executive of the international Social Democratic…