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.
After the Vision
How can I hew out a song when the hammer of my senses is coated with rust? How can I play the lute when my hand is ensnared in fetters of fear? For my heart has entered the gazelle’s paved [palace]…
The Innkeeper’s Love Song
O you paragon of glory and grace, listen to the call of Papos and his cry! He is bellowing like a bull, braying at you like a donkey, for you are his cow and his she-ass. His heart is already parched…
Ballad of Repentance
Dedicated to the Great Lord of Hosts.
Supreme and merciful God,
my affection to Your lofty and just compassion
dedicates to You today
the exordia of my muse.
Protect, immense Lord,
my coarse and…
Shreds of Earth
On a night like this if a shudder were to shake your flesh as though a nightmare
had severed your sleep I could have risen and quietly walked to the kitchen
to write you a poem that would bring you…
Parnassus
Technically I was a man.This spindly squeaky thing with the Adam’s-apple accent was, by virtue of being thirteen and bar-mitzvahed, a technical man.And so the phone call came: they needed a tenth for…
Monument with Biblical Verse, Modern Jerusalem
Monument with biblical citation, modern Jerusalem. The monument, erected in a park, reads: “Thus said the Lord of Hosts: There shall yet be old men and women in the squares of Jerusalem, each with…
Model Chair
Since chairs and beds were valuable items and not found in average homes (people usually sat on the floor and slept on mats), it is possible that terra-cotta models like this one from Lachish…
Seal of Ḥaman (or Ḥiman), with Griffin and Locust
The upper register of this seal from Megiddo, made of black serpentine with white spots, has an image of a striding griffin wearing a kilt and an Egyptian double crown, with an Egyptian ankh symbol…
At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews
[…] Second-generation Jews, like their immigrant parents, succeeded in developing a nucleus of Jewishness, defined through secondary associations, that made being Jewish an impelling reality for their…
To Be a Jew in France in 1982
Confronted by difficult problems after 1945 (reconstruction of a community life after the physical and material losses of the Second World War, integration of successive and ever more numerous waves…
The Yellow Wind
I belong to the generation that celebrated its bar mitzvah during the Six-Day War. Then, in 1967, the surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire…