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.
My First Day in the Twentieth Century
The truth, the mathematical truth, is that a new century begins on January 1 of the year one of the new hundred-year time span. But it is the custom to celebrate a new century on January 1 of the last…
Prayer against the Hasidim
“Blessed are you, God, God of our ancestors, the great, awesome, and holy God. You have bequeathed human understanding (da‘at ha-enoshit) to humanity. You have gifted us with the knowledge of your…
Progress: The Meaning of Passover
Once again, following our custom of addressing readers [of the weekly journal Jutrzenka (Dawn), April 3, 1863] in view of the upcoming celebrations, we open the book of books, our holy Torah, in order…
Likute Yosef (The Compilation of Joseph)
Likute Yosef (The Compilation of Joseph), a commentary on prayers, is an important source of information about the Jewish religious culture of Worms, Germany, one of the oldest and most important…
Title Page of Moses Cordovero’s Tefilah le-Moshe (Prayer of Moses)
Moses Cordovero was a revered scholar and teacher in the kabbalistic center of Safed, which stressed the importance of mystical prayer and kavanah (mystical intention). Tefilah le-Moshe contains kavan…
A Woman Drawing Water from a Well
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
D-C
In the late 1970s, after a period in which he painted only in black and white, Held began using bright colors in his paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, enabling him to explore space, volume…
Drawing for the Film “Felix in Exile”
Kentridge’s signature practice is to draw an image in charcoal, photograph it, and then repeatedly erase, redraw, rephotograph it, and then animate it on film. Felix in Exile is the fifth film in…
Emek ha-bakhah (Valley of Tears)
Granada was under control of the Ishmaelites for seven hundred years, until Ferdinand and Isabel, the monarchs of Spain, besieged it, for many days, and captured the whole region of that kingdom in…
Tratado de los sueños (Treatise on Dreams)
Illustrious sir, having frequently thought about and recalled many treatises which in the presence of Your Worship were practiced during the time when I enjoyed your divine…
Shalshelet ha-kabbalah (The Chain of Tradition): On Spirits
Now, after God has made known to you all of this by means of the toil of my hands, having gathered and bound them together, may the strength of my hand grow to write to you and to present before you…
Commentary: On the Pentateuch
And Jacob dwelt in the land of his father’s sojourning, in the land of Canaan (Genesis 37:1): In that part of the land of Canaan where his father had lived, similar to the verse: [To Mamre, to Kiryat…