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.
A Lovely Song about an Event in Hamburg
Which tells how a certain man took up with a prostitute in Hamburg, his first wife hearing of this came from Poland, how he was forced to give her a writ of divorce and this almost cost him his life…
Couplets of Joseph the Righteous
“It is only because the Lord was with us,”
says the old Israel;
in You lies holiness,
Israel’s praises.
“It is only because the Lord was with us,”
You elevated us above other men,
You saved us from…
Introduction: Salamone de Rossi’s Ha-shirim asher li-Shelomoh (The Songs of Solomon)
May the language of truth be established forever, or as the poet …
Counting the Omer
Leiba recognized that Fraydel was in danger of disappearing down the well of her own thoughts.
Fraydel was a secret keeping herself from the world. When she spoke, it was yet another way of keeping…
The Status Quo
[…] Must we conclude that Israeli society is doomed to experience a Kulturkampf, and that the Zionist synthesis is marching ineluctably toward its undoing? Before answering that question, let us…
This Month Is for You: Observing Rosh Hodesh as a Woman’s Holiday
Rosh Hodesh is celebrated only eleven times a year. Tishre, the month Rosh Hodesh coincides with Rosh Hashanah, is omitted. If Rosh Hodesh falls on two days, the ceremony may…
Kreuzer Sonata Advertisement
A Portuguese-language advertisement for February 5–6, 1915, performances in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of the Grande Companhia Israelita’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s novella The Kreuzer Sonata.
Sketches from Krochmalna Street: “The Charity Lady”
Along Krochmalna Street, placing her feet shod in elegant, light-colored boots carefully amid the muddy puddles, stepping aside at every moment so as not to stain her clothing against the greasy…
Cover for Peretz Markish’s Book of Poetry, Far folk un heymland (For People and Homeland)
The cover of Far folk un heymland features a red flag and Yiddish writing in which the letter qof has been stylized to resemble a hammer and sickle. The book was published when World War II was still…
Home! Home?
After surviving the war, Miklós Adler returned to his hometown of Debrecen and created sixteen woodcuts, signing them Ben Binyamin (“son of Benjamin”) in honor of his father. In this woodcut…
East End, London
In 1950, when this photograph was taken, much of London’s East End was in ruins, the result of heavy bombing during World War II. Its glory days as a vibrant Jewish immigrant community were over, and…
The Present Crisis of American Jewry
America has, in less than one generation, become the second largest center of the Jewish Diaspora, and bids fair to become the first, instead of the second, within another generation. No other country…