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.
Introspectivism
With this collection, we intend to launch a particular trend in Yiddish poetry which has recently emerged in the works of a group of Yiddish poets. We have chosen to call it the Introspective…
Manifesto
To the remnant whom Hashem calls Guardians of the Torah and Doers of His Word. May the Lord our God be with them and may they rise higher and higher our brethren guardians of the faith of israel! Our…
The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival
Let us bless the source of lifethat brings forth bread from the earth.N’vareykh et eyn haḥayimhamotzi’ah léḥem min ha’áretz.Hear, O Israel…
Hatikva
In 1947, when Kurt Weill’s orchestral arrangement of Hatikva received its world premiere in New York, it was still—as it had been for decades—the anthem of the modern Zionist movement, expressing the…
American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots
What we now routinely call klezmer in the United States—“Do you play klezmer?” “There’s a new klezmer album out”—is a truly American construct in three ways: the word sidesteps aesthetic and political…
Hot Tea and Sponge Cake at 10:00 P.M.
My mother and father were an embarrassment to me, up until high school. They were much older than my friends’ parents (my dad was forty-seven and my mother was forty-four when I was born), and they…
’Hirbet Hizah’: Between Remembrance and Forgetting
The debate in 1978 was not cathartic. It was just the opposite. Here we have something of a textbook example of the reciprocity between the present and collective memory: at…
The Kultura Work
The perceived role of the national culture in the Zionist Eretz-Israeli context was to shape the new Jewish society created in the land of Israel and to give it overall content. It aimed to shape the…
New Jews, Old Jews
…The rationalist model related to Jewish history and the Diaspora as accidents that could be corrected. It did not devote much thought to the past, but…
How to Save American Jews
Over the past ten years, the American Jewish community has undergone a radical inner shift in mood, from buoyant optimism to deep anxiety about its future. […]
The present anxiety can be dated to the…
Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Music in Nineteenth-Century Reform Sources from Hamburg: Ancient Tradition in the Dawn of Modernity
Let us begin with the most basic questions: Can oral traditions of music constitute a reliable source for historical research? While this question is applicable to most music…
The Song of Our Forefather Jacob and His Sons
I want to recount a beautiful tale. I ask that the men relax. Listen, and see how marvelous it is how merciful God restores justice for us.
Jacob:
He said to his son, I wanted to send you to find out…