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.
The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It
Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with Patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also…
Interpolation of the Sokolover Rebbe
The [Babylonian] Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin [109b] brings a statement that when a stranger came to the city of Sodom, he would be placed on a bed. Someone who was taller than the bed would have his…
Opening Address of the Jewish Women’s Congress
It is my pleasant duty, as chairman of the local committee, to extend to you all a hearty welcome to our city and to our Congress, the first Jewish Women’s Congress. It was with some misgiving that I…
On the Transfer of the Rabbinical Seminary from Berlin to Eretz Yisrael
[ . . . ] I wrote yesterday to my friend, the illustrious rabbi, our teacher, Rabbi S. Ahronson, and to Rabbi Meir Hildesheimer himself, may his light shine, in a sharp tone, making it clear that I…
Lesser Ury (and Jewish Art)
The strongest testimony to life is productivity, and the most direct form of productivity is art. That is why those of us who announce a life of the Jewish people inquire into the possibility of…
On the Division between Zionism and Religion
[ . . . ] I find myself obliged to commence with a general preface, which I bring to the fore on each occasion that I have occasion to speak about the way of “the Mizrachi” [movement] and its value…
Heine and the Consequences
But Heinrich Heine—even the aesthetes who are rescuing his immortality in an island publishing house (these gloriously impractical minds whose cerebral wrinkles trail away into ornament) have nothing…
The Sanctification of the Name
A passage in chapter 22 of the third Book of Moses was destined to become the starting point for one of the most peculiar religious concepts of the Jewish people. It reads: “Observe my laws and…
Women in the Synagogue
Duality manifests itself in all things, but in nothing is this two-foldness more plainly seen than in woman’s nature.
The weaker sex physically, it is the stronger spiritually, it having been said…
Jerusalem
See the Mount of Olives and the Greek monastery.
Minarets and cupolas abound,
Squares of yellow houses like honeycomb.
The valley of Josephat, white, dry fields—
There in the dell, where it is…
Shtetl
A visitor came to the shtetl,
A stranger, with unrest in his step . . .
No-one recognized his unrest. No-one asked him:
“Stranger, are you weary?”
Across the blue sky the evening drew its curtain…
And Cain Spoke unto Abel His Brother
(Genesis 4:8)
for D. G., my uncle
Abel, brother, yesterday the primal crime awoke me:
I had murdered your snow-white dreams and damned I was urging myself
endlessly on down the night-darkening…