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.
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…
The Limestone
If it forms the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,Are constantly homesick for, this is chieflyBecause it dissolves in water.—Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”If beauty and truth were to overlap…
Outsider
The moment she entered the room, she noticed something suspicious out of the corner of her eye. Dror and Koby stood next to her bed and pretended to tie their shoelaces. She knew…
In the City and in the Forest
1. The Waters of Strife (Meribah)What is it between me and you, O man of God, that you have come to me to remind me of my sin? (1 Kings 17:18)Drops of oil fell into the pitcher of water. A clamor and…