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.
Republican Citizenship and Jewish Uniqueness
Political modernity, by making the varied dimensions of existence automatic and, in particular, by separating the political from the religious, posed the problem of Jewish identity in a dramatic…
The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State
Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and…
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…
Utilitarian Follies
A political sect has sprung up avowedly adverse to the Estates of the Realm, and seeking by means which, of course, it holds legal, the abrogation of a majority of them. These anti-constitutional…
Silver circumcision plate
This silver plate from Padua, Italy, was made for use in the brit milah, the circumcision ritual celebrated when a baby boy is eight days old. In this detailed depiction of the ritual, the baby seems…