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.
An Anti-Zionist’s Comment to the Polish Jewish Intelligentsia
I was born a Jew, and as I attained self-awareness, I realized that almost four thousand years of human history were working to present me with questions: How was I to understand myself as a Jew, how…
An Open Letter about Literature
To the editorial board of Ha-Nir, greetings.For some time, I have wanted to tell our honorable writers what a simple householder [ba‘al ha-bayit] like me wants from our literature.By using the term si…
An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language
Ahead of the first verses of the Eastern European Jewish poets, I would like to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, how much more Jargon [Yiddish] you understand than you believe you do.
I am not actually…
Notes in Response to the Zionist Cause
3 Shevat 5663 [January 31, 1903]
From all the Zionist essays emerge that which we see with our very eyes: their entire purpose and effort is to instill the supposition among Jews that the Torah and…
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…
Russia: Anno 1905
A Young Jew. The weed of their hatred which has grown so tall
now turns towards us many heads,
many pointed petals and leaves;
what did they whisper to each other before the ikons,
and smile at over…
Jud’ Süss Oppenheimer on His First Visit with Professor Sigmund Freud
That’s you—the Eternal Jew.
Of Esau’s lullaby, of Gentile legend.
And I am your nephew—Jud’ Süss Oppenheimer.
You, seer, who can see far, see clear, see through,
You may say that I—am not I,
That one…
The Book of Valor
This book seeks to unfold before the reader the scroll of Jewish valor, in both Israel and the diaspora, from the destruction of the Hebrew state to the harbingers of the renaissance of the…
First Proclamation: 26 May 1941
A fire is now sweeping over the whole Old World, threatening to annihilate, heaven forbid, more than two-thirds of the Jewish people. Nobody can guarantee that the fire, heaven…