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.
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…
Art-Literature and the Revolutionary Public
We live in a time of Sturm und Drang [storm and stress]. Every day brings new disappointments and new hopes. Old forms lose their value, no new ones are being created. And the synthetic gaze of…
Language Insomnia
At the beginning of the Jewish labor movement in the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Jewish youth began to return from Russian to Yiddish. This started with a free choice, as later on we chose Hebrew…
Encounter
Morning flew by in the usual way,
Up and down streets, it raced,
Unwinding the spring of an ongoing watch
That the night would wind up again.
A coat was fastened over the chest
With a clasp and a…
Ku-bukh (Book of Cows)
Title page of the first known printed version of the Ku-bukh (Book of Cows), a sixteenth-century collection of Yiddish fables, published in Verona, Italy in 1595. The later compendium of Yiddish…
Torah Ark in the Klausen Synagogue
The Klausen Synagogue in Prague gets its name from the kloyz (a complex of buildings used for religious purposes, including synagogues) that originally stood on its site, erected in the 1570s. The…
Wall Painting in the Isaac Synagogue, Kraków
The Isaac (or Izaak) Synagogue in Kraków was built between 1640 and 1644. Named after its donor, Izaak Jakubowicz (d. 1673), also known as Isaac the Rich, the synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis…