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.
Der pinkes (cover)
Der pinkes (The Book of Records, or The Annals) appropriated the term for the old-fashioned record book of a Jewish community or institution to name a very new phenomenon: the first “annual for the…
Voices of the Matriarchs
What does it mean to study women’s religion? How are we to define our subject matter? How are we to understand the relationship of the history of women’s religious life and practice to the history of…
Yiddish Lectures in Philadelphia
I want, at the request of the Arbeter Ring’s National Education Committee, to give a brief overview of the lectures we have arranged this season.
It is true that we haven’t had the opportunity to…
From Distant Lands
[ . . . ] Jewish immigration to South America has now been going on for fully twenty-five years, primarily to Argentina. This immigration began with such energy and…
Diary Entry: On Yiddish Theater
23 October. The actors convince me by their presence time and again, to my consternation, that most of what I’ve written about them so far is wrong. It is wrong because I wrote about them with…
Letter to Mendele
Dedication to My Dearly Beloved Grandfather, Reb Mendalle Mocher SephorimTo my dear grandfather, greetings!Stempenyu, my first long novel, which I inscribe to you, is yours; not only because I have…
Editorial Statement of Der nayer gayst
Many Jews in America owe their spiritual-intellectual development to the progressive Yiddish-language periodicals that are published here. But the existing progressive Yiddish-language periodicals are…
Yiddish Proverbs and Idioms
Some of the proverbs I have collected appeared previously in the yearbook Der hoyz-fraynd published by M. Spektor in Warsaw (1888–1889). The collection I am now presenting to the reader as…
Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn / A Few Words in the Mother Tongue
lemoshl: for example
di kurve the whore
a woman who acknowledges her passions
di yidene the Jewess the Jewish woman
ignorant overbearing
let’s face it: every woman is one
di yente the gossip…
Bewildering Clarity of Tongues
for Aaron Lebedeff (1873–1960), performer on the Yiddish stage
Bewildering clarity of tongues:
names you never heard, food
you never ate, a wild dance
you never learned, light hanging
in the sky…
The Lovemaking of I. B. Singer
A woman named Bella stayed behind to speak to me. Her hair was carefully waved, touched with streaks of blond, her eyes round and blue. She was not one of the shapeless old, but kept waist, hips, and…
Messages from My Father
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that my father did not impress the world at large as a powerful figure. We were at a camera store on the Plaza—a faux-Andalusian shopping district that…