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.
Perek be-shir (A Treatise on Poetry)
A compilation containing all the techniques of poetry simply put; covering all the principles, meters, rhymes, correct methods, and true rules; sifted and clarified; solid as a bronze mirror, such…
Beri‘ah ve-Zimrah (Briyo and Zimro)
Zimro, the son of Tovas [ . . . ] was very good-looking, highly intelligent, and a scholar. Now, the king loved him more than any other member of the royal household. He was the leading figure at…
Generation without Memory: A Jewish Journey in Christian America
There are contradictions and ambivalences in our celebrating Thanksgiving. We are recent Americans. It wasn’t the Mayflower that brought our people over here. We know too much about what the coming of…
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…
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…
Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective
The Central Conference of American Rabbis has on special occasions described the spiritual state of Reform Judaism. The centenaries of the founding of the Union of American Hebrew…
Adonay, Our People Have Called You
Adonay,
Our people have called You Monarch of the universe.
Help us who live without a monarch on a throne
To perceive Your sovereignty
In the royal splendor that pervades the universe,
In the holy…
Fund for Recruitment and Rescue Poster
This Hebrew-language poster urges Jews in Palestine to lend a hand to the rescue of Jewish refugees. During World War II, Jewish immigration to Palestine was banned by British Mandate authorities. A…
A Call for the Creation of a Sephardic Society for the Study of Jewish History and Culture
If there is one branch of study that is entirely neglected in our schools it is the history of our forefathers from the time of their dispersion across the globe until the present. . . . [True,] our…
Hasidism Encounters Reform and Produces Anarchism
The chief hypocrite of Russia who sold his soul and his ideas to the Hasidim for the price of 2,000 shekels wrote the following: “If any man says, I am a Jew in accordance with the law of Moses (Mende…
Factory near Pontoise
Camille Pissarro painted landscapes that, unusually for the time, included industrial elements, like this sugar-beet factory near Pissarro’s home in Pontoise. Like other impressionist paintings, this…