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.
An Anti-Zionist Appeal from Istanbul
Nearly fifteen years ago, following frequent persecutions against our coreligionists in Russia and Romania, a few European Jews conceived of the project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine and…
Toward a Reconstruction of Judaism
For the first time in its career, Judaism is challenged by the Jew more vigorously even than by the Gentile. However anxious the modern Jew may be to remain a Jew, he finds himself today in a quandary…
Speech: The Frank Tragedy, the Jews, and the Negroes
That Leo Frank was lynched primarily because he was a Jew has been asserted by the most serious, and best informed newspapers all over the country. A newspaper like the local Evening Post went so far…
Sermon: On Freedom
Indeed, at a time when Israel was settled on their soil, in the land of Israel, the agricultural dimension of the holidays, their relation to the field, that is to say, their material aspect, was a…
Secular Currents in the Synagogal Chant in America
The distinction between religious and secular music is not universally admitted. There is a considerable group of people, some of them very learned in the art and science of sound, who claim that…
Vilna
Vilna, my great matriarch, an established Jewish city,
Jerusalem of the Exile, an ancient nation’s consolation in the north!
This [poem] is your patched kerchief, like the roof of the old synagogue,…
Buy Cigarettes!
Cigarettes! Cigarettes!
My voice rings through the streets
With eyes overcast, cloudy—
Buy! Buy! Buy!
Hunting foxes—Cossacks ride—
With horseshoes like scythes—
And cut down sounds like sheaves:
Buy…
Raḥel
Behold her blood flows in my blood,
Behold her voice within me sings—
Raḥel the herder of Laban’s sheep,
Raḥel—mother’s mother.
And so the house is too constricting for me
And the city—alien,
For…
Self-Portrait
When the cool, colorful, gentile Sundays come,
both sit—Valenti, the watchman from my courtyard
and his pock-marked, redmouthed, piggish old lady
back-to-back on a wooden bench.
Both of them gaze…
Russia: Anno 1905
A Young Jew. The weed of their hatred which has grown so tall
now turns towards us many heads,
many pointed petals and leaves;
what did they whisper to each other before the ikons,
and smile at over…
Jud’ Süss Oppenheimer on His First Visit with Professor Sigmund Freud
That’s you—the Eternal Jew.
Of Esau’s lullaby, of Gentile legend.
And I am your nephew—Jud’ Süss Oppenheimer.
You, seer, who can see far, see clear, see through,
You may say that I—am not I,
That one…
The Book of Valor
This book seeks to unfold before the reader the scroll of Jewish valor, in both Israel and the diaspora, from the destruction of the Hebrew state to the harbingers of the renaissance of the…