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.
Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood
[ . . . ] The two worlds, in my childhood, were not really separate. The synagogue in Graham Street, to which we walked across the Meadows every Saturday morning, was as much a part of the Edinburgh…
Things: A Story of the Sixties
For the first time they earned some money. They did not like their work; could they have liked it? But they did not dislike it a great deal either. They felt they were learning a lot from it. Year…
Shema
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust…
The Schlemiel as Modern Hero
[ . . . ] Modern Jewish humor grows from the tension of having to reconcile a belief as absolute as Elijah’s with an experience of failure as absolute as that of the priests of Baal…
The Second Scroll
And then—it was after I had returned from Tiberias to Tel Aviv to attend a literary soirée—then the creative activity, archetypical, all-embracing, that hitherto I had sought in vain, at last…
Yoine Bird
They were neighbors for many, many years. Thirty, forty, maybe half a century . . . ever since Colony D . . . was established back at the beginning of the eighteen-nineties.
Their parents grew up…
Bom Retiro, or The Childhood Neighborhood
Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, the so-called “Days of Awe” arrived.
There was no Jew in all of Bom Retiro who, God forbid, would ever think of not observing them. Any endeavor, no matter how important…
The Story of Isaac
The door it opened slowly,
My father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
His blue eyes they were shining
And his voice was very cold.
He said, “I’ve had a vision
And…
The Jewish Catalog
Perhaps the most difficult question we have been asked in the course of compiling this catalog has been, “What exactly is it?” Having realized quite early that there are no preexisting…
Hellenism in Jewish Palestine
Rabbinic literature is replete with valuable information about the life, manners and customs of the ancients. Many passages in it can be properly understood only in the general frame of its…
Goyim
When first touched by memory, I found myself already in the midst of [ . . . ] ominous twilights which came intermittently, in series, and have stayed with me as the keenest memory of childhood.
Our…
The Cold Wind and the Warm
Tobey’s Voice:I find as I grow older that I keep going back to my friendship with Willie—when we were young and happy and living in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the early years of the century…