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.
Art-Literature and the Revolutionary Public
We live in a time of Sturm und Drang [storm and stress]. Every day brings new disappointments and new hopes. Old forms lose their value, no new ones are being created. And the synthetic gaze of…
Language Insomnia
At the beginning of the Jewish labor movement in the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Jewish youth began to return from Russian to Yiddish. This started with a free choice, as later on we chose Hebrew…
Encounter
Morning flew by in the usual way,
Up and down streets, it raced,
Unwinding the spring of an ongoing watch
That the night would wind up again.
A coat was fastened over the chest
With a clasp and a…
Ku-bukh (Book of Cows)
Title page of the first known printed version of the Ku-bukh (Book of Cows), a sixteenth-century collection of Yiddish fables, published in Verona, Italy in 1595. The later compendium of Yiddish…
Torah Ark in the Klausen Synagogue
The Klausen Synagogue in Prague gets its name from the kloyz (a complex of buildings used for religious purposes, including synagogues) that originally stood on its site, erected in the 1570s. The…
Wall Painting in the Isaac Synagogue, Kraków
The Isaac (or Izaak) Synagogue in Kraków was built between 1640 and 1644. Named after its donor, Izaak Jakubowicz (d. 1673), also known as Isaac the Rich, the synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis…
Kitsur shene luḥot ha-berit (Abridged Two Tablets of the Covenant)
There are a few Torah scholars who are rich in knowledge and whose mental grasp is abundant, while others do not possess an intellectual grasp akin to theirs, for everyone possesses mental grasp in…
The State of Yiddish Children’s Literature
In the past there were no children among Jews, only “little Jews without beards,” so neither was there any children’s literature. Boys in the traditional heder used to read Ḥumesh [The Pentateuch]…
The Affirmation of the Diaspora
We all recognize the tragic aspects of the Diaspora and we cannot hope to achieve in the Diaspora as full and complete national-cultural development as is possible for a nation living in its own…
To the Readers of Literarishe monatsshriften
Literature cannot survive, cannot develop freely and expansively, if it depends on an underdeveloped reader, if it satisfies the spiritual-aesthetic needs only of those who have no access to the…
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language has been assembled on the basis of inclusiveness—that is to say, as a dictionary which attempts to record and include all the words of the Yiddish language…
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories
Modern Yiddish literature focuses upon the shtetl during its last tremor of self-awareness, the historical moment when it is still coherent and self-contained but already…