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.
Art-Literature and the Revolutionary Public
We live in a time of Sturm und Drang [storm and stress]. Every day brings new disappointments and new hopes. Old forms lose their value, no new ones are being created. And the synthetic gaze of…
Studies in Judaism
The purpose in view was, as may easily be gathered from the essays themselves, to bring under the notice of the English public a type of men produced by the Synagogue of the…
Responsum: On Prostitutes’ Gifts to the Synagogue
Concerning the matter of prostitutes from the daughters of Israel—far be it from our straight paths—who dedicate a new ark curtain or Torah scroll cover, it is permissible from a legal point of view…
Russia
Russia! If my faith in you were any less great
I might have said something different.
I might have complained: You have led us astray,
And seduced us young wandering gypsies.
Precious to us is each…
Unity
When God’s holy law is read out
Do you think I forget one bold lust?
And enjoying each lust with fearing,
Do you think I know not God’s law?
Translated by David Soeterndorp.
Yosef de la Reina
A mountain in the desert.
On the desert mountain—
Nine,
Nine tall men.
There must be something here—
The Nine want something here—
And the tenth man?
He stands at the head of them…
Midnight
A late crescent drips, its blood still red,
And the tranquil grasses of the night
Bend their small heads, one upon another,
Slumbering, arm beneath cheek,
In its peaceful light.
A weary wanderer…
Portrait
This is what he must have looked like,
Christ in the autumn, like me with my
twenty-two summers: still beardless,
blond, and the girls couldn’t help it,
dreamed of him night after night!
Translated…
Freckled Childhood
I certainly had an obscure childhood
but intensely my own,
a childhood which wanted to be dashing
but had the features of a caricature.
Yes, a caricature. For example:
that absurd love for Sophie,…
Fabius Lind Is Riding the Wind
Fabius Lind clings to the flowing mane
Of young spring,
Galloping on the free highways of desire.
Voluptuous desert-winds around him,
Voluptuous desert-winds inside him.
Fabius Lind surrenders to…
Fall in Vilna
Yom Kippur, when the narrow alleys of the shulhoyf
cradle the small shtibls, pious and scared,
householders hurry with their taleisim
and old men shuffle along in their socks—
I feel the narrow…
A Joyful Mother of Children
I entitled this volume Em Habanim Semeḥah [Psalms 113:9], based on the Jerusalem tractate of Berakhot (toward the close of the second chapter) which portrays Erets Yisrael as the mother of Israel and…