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.
Power/Jew Süss
[ . . . ] After the intractable insolence shown by Süss when his sentence was pronounced, he was fettered cross-wise in the Chamber of Nobles, where he was to be confined until execution, and kept…
Tristia
I have studied the science of leaving
in night’s unbraided sorrows.
Oxen ruminate—the waiting lingers to the final
hour of the city’s vigil—and I honor rituals
from that other night—the rooster…
The Sins of My Youth
There are two sorts of biography: the biography a famous person writes for his admirers, because the public likes to know everything about celebrities, and [the] autobiography, usually written because…
Esther Play for Purim
Purim plays (Purim shpiln, in Yiddish), sometimes also called Esther plays, have been known since the fifteenth century in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities. These folk plays were performed on…
Alliance with the Sultan
This satirical political cartoon, printed in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the Ladino socialist periodical El Pueblo (The People), mocks Theodor Herzl’s 1902 visit to Istanbul. The cartoon indicates two…
1920 Diary
Isaac Babel offers a stark and unflinching account of the pogroms, looting, and violence against Jewish communities he witnessed as a war correspondent during the Polish-Soviet War.
Introduction to the Commentary on Numbers—Me’am Lo’ez
The introduction to the first volume of this work, which you already have, explains that one must know what mitzvot God commanded us to perform, and what he obliged us to avoid, to find…
