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.
Seeking the Jewish Tradition
Is the Jewish tradition inherently liberal or inherently conservative? The answer to this much-debated question is quite simple: yes.
Which is to say that if by “the Jewish tradition” we mean what is…
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people? All other theological conversation is intellectually diverting; somewhat like…
It Is Up to Us
It is up to us
To hallow Creation,
To respond to Life
With the fullness of our lives.
It is up to us
To meet the World,
To embrace the Whole
Even as we wrestle
With its parts.
It is up to us
To…
The Refugee (European Vision)
Nussbaum was a refugee in Belgium when he painted this picture. It is one of several (some self-portraits) that express the fear and uncertainty of life as a refugee. The dominant element in the…
Stalingrad Attack
Georgi Zelma’s photograph of soldiers charging up Mamayev Hill with their guns at the ready became one of the iconic photographs of Soviet heroism in the battle of Stalingrad. What draws the eye…
Jacob’s Ladder
Helen Frankenthaler’s approach to painting forged a new direction for modern art. She developed a technique in which thinned oil paint seeped directly into the canvas, staining the fabric and yielding…
Apple Green Reduction Fired Glaze with Melt Fissures, Earthenware
Like many of Gertrud Natzler's ceramics, this bowl is flowing and graceful, and, as Otto, her husband and artistic partner, said about her pots in general, “practically floats.” The Natzlers’ works…
David and Saul
Ernst Josephson painted David and Saul early in his career, when he was working with mostly historical and biblical subjects. Here a young, eroticized David plays a lyre for a darkly brooding King…
Introduction to the Pentateuch
It has been a belief universally shared by Israelites of all times that the Pentateuch was exclusively and entirely authored and redacted by the great prophet Moses; only the last chapter of…
The Claims of the Jews to an Equality of Rights
We will admit, that, during the ages of superstition and darkness, silence was often imposed upon us by the terrors of…
A Word to Jews and Slavs
But you, West Slavic Jews, you who are so proud of your intelligence and education, you who are so proud of the sciences that you tend like exotic plants [ . . . ] I ask whether you are so…
Signature of Solomon Molkho
Solomon Molkho, the sixteenth-century messianic pretender, included a sketch of his own fanciful flag in his signature. His flag, modeled after those of the Maccabees, included the Hebrew word “Macabi…