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.
Judeo-Arabic Proverbs from Fez
1. “If a pale woman desires you, do not desire her! Do not waste on her the legacy from your father and your grandfather! She is like a white spot that, settling in the eye, blinds it.”
This…
In Defense of the Natural Response
When macabre reality gnaws at a person’s soul, it is hard to devote oneself to psychological investigation, even of very pressing subjects. The event also seemed cut off from life, entirely academic…
Last Will and Testament
My beloved son and daughter!
I am writing these lines, my dear children, in the vale of tears of…
Consider Iwo Jima
This is perhaps the grimmest, and surely the holiest task we have faced since D-Day. Here before us lie the bodies of…
A Load of Shoes
The cartwheels rush,
quivering.
What is their burden?
Shoes, shivering.
The cart is like
a great hall:
the shoes crushed together
as though at a ball.
A wedding? A party?
Have I gone blind?
Who…
The New Wave in Hebrew Fiction
The inception of literature is certainly not merely a matter of ideas and ideology. Not only are the contents connected to the forms and dependent on them, but the development of the forms has its own…
Green Aquarium
“Your teeth are bars of bone. Behind them, in a crystal cell, your shackled words. Remember the advice of an elder: the guilty, those that dropped poison pearls into your goblet—let them go free. In…
City of Many Days
The long-suffering city took in people with the strangest ideas, philosophers, freaks, madmen, each with his own nutty flavor, who vanished as suddenly as they appeared. Sometimes Jerusalem seemed to…
Family Conflicts
My childhood, if we’re speaking of relations at home, was exceptionally easy; I never felt a need to rebel against my parents’ conservatism. I encountered no gates to break through—they were all…
Of Bombs and Mice: A Novel of Wartime Warsaw
Some two years ago Nata had been deported from Warsaw to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now she was free, but still unable to come to grips with life, so newly regained, though in the first breath…
A Story about a Name
Older people still remember it. Younger people know about it from reading our classic writers of the older generation: how Jews once gave much thought to naming a child, long before it was born and…
God Hid His Face
All roads led to death,
Every road.
All winds breathed betrayal,
Every wind.
In every doorway, vicious dogs barked,
In all the doorways.
All the waters laughed at us,
All the waters.
Every night grew…