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.
Woman Playing Frame Drum
The drumhead of this Phoenician-style terra-cotta figurine from Shikmona (south of Haifa) is recessed, suggesting that the drum had only a single head. Figurines like this are typically found in…
Declaration of Yom Kippur War
Citizens of Israel, today, at around 2 p.m., the armies of Egypt and Syria launched an attack against Israel. They carried out a series of attacks from the air, with armor and artillery, in Sinai and…
Under This Blazing Light
There are now 157 or 162 independent states in the world, both new and old. The vast majority of them are under the sway of oppressive regimes, slavery, mass-brainwashing, ruler-worship: in one way or…
To Mend the World
What is a Jew? Who is a Jew? After this catastrophe, what is a Jew’s relation to the Jewish past? We resume our original question as we turn from one rupture in post-Holocaust Jewish existence—of the…
Israeli Blues
“Secular is a terrible word”; “secular is a word I don’t like,” “there is no such thing as a secular Jew”—these clichés are common among absolutely secular intellectuals when they discuss problems of…
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…
Voices of the Matriarchs
What does it mean to study women’s religion? How are we to define our subject matter? How are we to understand the relationship of the history of women’s religious life and practice to the history of…
Condemnation of Scoffers and Redemption of the Humble
Ha! Those who would hide their plans
Deep from the Lord!
Who do their work in dark places
And say, “Who sees us, who takes note of us?”
How perverse of you!
Should the potter be accounted as the…
Punishment by a Distant Nation
Lo, I am bringing against you, O House of Israel, A nation from afar
—declares the Lord;
It is an enduring nation,
It is an ancient nation;
A nation whose language you do not know—
You will not…
On Courage and Resistance
Let’s start with risk. The risk of being punished. The risk of being isolated. The risk of being injured or killed. The risk of being scorned. We are all conscripts in one sense or another. For all of…
Will There Be One Jewish People by the Year 2000?
Today, there again exists a serious threat that the differences within the world-wide Jewish community may end in schism.
The foremost reason for the gravity of the situation is the explosion in Jews…