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.
Set Design for Sholem Aleichem’s Get (Divorce)
The Russian Revolution initially encouraged a flowering of Jewish cultural activity, lifting restrictions on Jewish publishing. Jewish theater companies experimented with modernist approaches to stage…
A Dictionary of Political Terms
Politishes verter-bukh (A Dictionary of Political Terms) is an anonymous work billed as “an interpretation of the strange words that are used in Yiddish newspapers, journals, and political and…
The Melting Pot
The plot of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot described the love of a Jewish musician and composer for the Christian daughter of a Russian antisemite as epitomizing the promise of America…
The Founding of the Honorable Spanish Community in Vienna
This happened in the city of Madrid late at night, at the hour when nobody was in the streets, when all people were in bed resting from the exhaustion of the previous day. Suddenly, there was a knock…
The Red Heifer
It happened on a Saturday night at the end of summer. Reuven and his household were sitting at twilight and enjoying their heifer. His youngest were patting her, the older were praising her. The…
The Man from Buenos Aires
Riding a train doesn’t have to be dull if you manage to fall in with good company. You can meet up with merchants, men who know business, and then the time flies, or with people who have been around…
Luna
A month later, when a young man, about eighteen years old, Mulla Ovadia’s nephew, came to his father’s property and saw all that his uncle had done in it, he was told that his uncle had a wife in…
Shabos-Nakhamu
This is how things go with your average Jew. But Hershele is not your average Jew. It wasn’t by chance that he was famous in all of Ostropol, in all of Berdichev, and in all of Vilyuisk.
Hershele…
My Tiny, Ugly World
Never have I been content with my narrow, dark, gloomy world, and always am I aware of the contrast between the great, beautiful world and my tiny, ugly world. And always I say, “The place is too…
Ignác Goldziher Speaking at His Bar Mitzvah, 1863
Hungarian orientalist Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) was born in Székesfehérvár and studied in Berlin and Leiden. He traveled in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. For nearly thirty years, Goldziher was an…
Memoirs of a Grandmother
In these years of the 1880s, as anti-Semitism raged all over Russia, there were only two ways for the Jews. Either give up all that had become essential to them, in the name of Judaism; or take the…
Harvey Demonstrating the Circulation of the Blood to Charles I
This painting depicts the seventeenth-century physician William Harvey demonstrating his discovery of blood circulation, a seminal moment in the history of modern medicine. Harvey, personal physician…