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.
Atheistic Theology
Jewish thought, having always been in a vital relation to Christian scholarship—sometimes, as in scholasticism, the influencing part, sometimes, as in the 19th century, the influenced part—has…
Fate of the Jewish People
The educated Englishman can live his entire life without ever once giving a moment’s thought to his people’s historical destiny or purpose. He knows instinctively that his people are alive and intact…
Our Renaissance
Ladies and gentlemen!
We can say that time has passed and pens have dried up. Misery is our destiny and the West utilizes it as a tool to ensure our silence. The West manages and shapes our destiny as…
Apology for Judaism
The Messiah of Israel does not come to redeem men from some original sin they never committed, nor from sins which they can liberate themselves of every day, through divine mercy and their own powers…
Sephardi, Not Oriental
I have noticed the change of the word “Oriental” to “Sephardi” in the masthead of the latest issue of the journal [La Amerika], “Organ of the Judeo-Sephardi (and no longer Oriental) Colony of America…
One Literature in Two Languages
Some impassioned readers among us will not admit that our one and only literature has a double language. After the Czernowitz conference, one of our Hebrew writers (now living in America) swore…
Turkish Music in the Synagogue: Objections of a Rabbi
The sinyor Rav h"r Shaul had a strong aversion to the Turkish language to the extent that he would excommunicate anyone singing Turkish songs. Not only Turkish songs, but even a Jewish liturgical…
Lamentations
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
After Havdaleh
“ . . . And all those who are on the left side go and wander in the world and seek to dress themselves in the body.”—From Zohar Beraishit
When the Havdoleh candle is extinguished,
In Gehenna, the…
We’re Laughing Our Heads Off
We’re laughing our heads off:
None of us wears a top-hat
We just go around with heads—or without heads—
But the Rabbi of Uman
Holds up a mirror to the sun.
We laugh our heads off
When a gang comes…
Verses to a Dictionary and to the Neckerchiefs (Worn by the Gauchos)
With you, it is not impossible to define
creatures and things with the simplicity
of the fish whose scales streak the sea with blue and gold,
Or of the sea itself that swells with the gracefulness of…
The Killers of the Fields
In ascetic silence, in stony skirts,God’s handmaid falls on her face—Flash of an empty night, a forlorn desert waste,Shards of sunset upon the rocks.This land. Trodden, just like this, by a wandering…