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.
The Eastern European Era in Jewish History
We Jews, the first nation in the world that began not only to mark but also to appraise and to judge the generations, evaluate eras on the basis of different criteria, namely, how much refinement is…
Journal, 1935–1944: The Fascist Years
I am beginning to get used to the years of war. We seem to struggle through the same journey from first of January to first of January, in a nightmare that is itself beginning…
The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann
My negotiations with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his associates, which culminated in the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952, make up one of the…
Photography
Photographs shock us in so far as they show us something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with…
The Religious Philosophy of the Jews
Note: The word “religion” is not biblical. It is taken over from paganism, where it does not include the factor of freedom. People disagree as to whether it is derived from religere or relegere; about…
Me’irat enayim (Light of the Eyes)
There is a severe admonition addressed to every individual within Israel not to add any precept on his own initiative onto those precepts which are written in the Torah, and…
The Semitic Nations
With the same character, with which the individual human being is born, with the same he descends into the grave. The kindly disposed does not become ill-disposed, the judicious does not become…
Synagogue Service for the New Year
This illustration depicting Rosh Hashanah services in a synagogue appeared in the book Jüdisches Ceremoniel (Jewish Ceremonial Customs), by Paul Christian Kirchner, a Jewish convert to Christianity…
Silver Hanukkah Lamp
This Hanukkah lamp from Frankfurt am Main, like the earliest known silver Hanukkah lamps made in Germany, is shaped like a chest and resembles inkwells of the period. This one is relatively…
New York, ca. 1970
The street photographer Garry Winogrand said he was motivated by wanting “to see what the world looks like in photographs.” He did not regard his photographs as identical with the reality of the…
The Writing on the Wall: Almstadtstrasse (Formerly Grenadierstrasse 7): Slide Projection of Former Hebrew Bookstore, Berlin (1930)
In The Writing on the Wall, Attie brought the ghosts of pre-World War II Jewish life in Berlin temporarily to life by projecting black-and-white slides of Jewish schools, bookstores, kosher butchers…
Shevut Yehudah (The Captivity of Judah)
I stayed a long time in Hanau because of the heavy burden laid upon me from teaching youth. Although this is a labor performed for the sake of Heaven, it is nonetheless the case that whoever pleases…