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.
Jewish Women and Zionism
When history recounts the life and fortune of the peoples who lived in various epochs, when it lets us believe in the marvelous strides that they had made, whether in the field of war, or for…
An Ottoman Jewish Activist in Cairo Proposes Settling Jews in the Sudan
Mr. Abraham Galante, editor of La Vara, has recently developed a plan for Jewish colonization in the Sudan. Although he treats the old proposal to settle Jews in Uganda as a point of departure…
Toward a Reconstruction of Judaism
For the first time in its career, Judaism is challenged by the Jew more vigorously even than by the Gentile. However anxious the modern Jew may be to remain a Jew, he finds himself today in a quandary…
Popular Poetry of the Russian Jews
[ . . . ] Similarly, the Russian Jews use the traditional rhyming couplet in those verses that chronicle a historical event or inculcate an ethical truth. The real folksongs, however, are set to music…
Sermon on the Melting Pot
There is no denying that under the influence of this enthusiasm for America, the disintegrating process of the Melting Pot is taking place in large measure. That it is not, fortunately, taking place…
An Exchange on the Jewish Question
Is there a Jewish people? Thousands of Jews, whose language at school and in daily discourse is Hebrew, are again living in Palestine. Neo-Hebrew literature has essayists like Ahad Ha-Am, poets like B…
Outlines of Liberal Judaism
[ . . . ] God chose the Jews: they are a chosen people, though not a people (as I hold and as I shall subsequently maintain) in the sense that the English or the…
Vilna
Vilna, my great matriarch, an established Jewish city,
Jerusalem of the Exile, an ancient nation’s consolation in the north!
This [poem] is your patched kerchief, like the roof of the old synagogue,…
Buy Cigarettes!
Cigarettes! Cigarettes!
My voice rings through the streets
With eyes overcast, cloudy—
Buy! Buy! Buy!
Hunting foxes—Cossacks ride—
With horseshoes like scythes—
And cut down sounds like sheaves:
Buy…
Raḥel
Behold her blood flows in my blood,
Behold her voice within me sings—
Raḥel the herder of Laban’s sheep,
Raḥel—mother’s mother.
And so the house is too constricting for me
And the city—alien,
For…
Self-Portrait
When the cool, colorful, gentile Sundays come,
both sit—Valenti, the watchman from my courtyard
and his pock-marked, redmouthed, piggish old lady
back-to-back on a wooden bench.
Both of them gaze…
Joseph the Righteous
Zlikha:I will leave him in prison now[for] he has committed a great sin.May he taste the recompense of his evil deed thereand may this wicked man die.[They take Yosef and she remains perplexed and at…