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 Helsingfors Program
Recognizing that the organization of the Jewish people for the purpose of independent national action constitutes, in accordance with the second clause of the Basel Program, one of the most important…
Zionism Needs a Living Content
In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people…
Unmasked
I have always had the illusion that my face did not clearly betray the calumny of my Jewish heritage. I have always taken care to conceal carefully the bitter secret that my father was a rabbi and my…
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…
Me‘am Lo‘ez to the Song of Songs
Notice, dear readers, that one of the foundations of Judaism is the belief (אמונה) in השארת הנפש, the abidingness of the soul, which means the immortality of the soul, for a person’s soul does not die…
Tolstoy and the Jews
I have often been asked, and still am asked, whether I know from my frequent conversations with Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy about his attitudes toward the Jews. I am asked whether I spoke with him on…
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…
In Central Park
Who is to blame that I don’t see your tree,
Garden in snow, my garden in snow.
Who is to blame that I don’t see your tree—
When a woman goes out for a stroll in your snow,
Her bosom rising and…
The Voice
Over and over, yes, over and over,
I shook the pinions of my anger,
Again and again you broke faith with me,
And I stormed at your crop of iniquity.
But over and over, and over and over,
Your songs…
A Stubborn Back—and Nothing More
Come, let us hide ourselves in caves,
in stony crevices, in graves
where stretched full length on the hard ground
we lie, backs up and faces down.
We shall not record, we shall not say
why we’ve…