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.
A Series of Verses to the Venerable Ancient Whose Portrait Hangs in the Window of a Lottery Agency
The Avenida de Mayo
glows with a virginal light beneath the Sabbath sky.
That light strikes
the window pane that displays your portrait:
Laban amidst a flock of gaily colored lottery
tickets, green…
Tropic Nightmare in Singapore
Seven continents, seven seas,
and two and forty years—
and torrid equatorial nights
filled with nightmare fears.
Open eyes, naked heart.
And draining blood from me,
mosquitoes buzzing, buzzing…
The New World
A new world being made—one hears
In childhood that it has begun;
Then comes the passage of the years—
Is it not yet fully done?
The new world being made—always,
From childhood on—and on the day
The…
Lord I Have Seen Too Much
Lord, I have seen too much for one who sat
In quiet at his window’s luminous eye
And puzzled over house and street and sky,
Safe only in the narrowest habitat;
Who studies peace as if the world were…
The Oath
By these eyes that have seen the woe and grief,
their outcries heaving to my heart’s embrace,
by this compassion which taught me: forgive
till the time did come too awful for grace—
I have taken this…
On Frustrations and Prestidigitators
For the role of scapegoat, the prestidigitators chose Jews.
Rattling around in the recesses of their memory were recollections about how prewar governments in…
Quai Blériot
It all began one wild dawn
The barges slid by under torrents of rain
The clouds raced past shredded and torn
above charcoal-glinting roofs
Two bourgeois dogs passed by with a sideways gait
The…
America Is Not Babylonia
But what about the future? Does the American-Jewish community possess those traits and characteristics which, as we know from the experience of a dozen Diaspora communities over two thousand years…
Psalm
Veritas sequitur . . .
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
T…
Emet ve-emunah (Truth and Faith)
There is a certain Ḥayah [angelic being] in the firmament, who bears the sign of truth upon its forehead during the daytime, whereby the angels know that it is day, and in the evening, it bears the…
Tiferet Yonatan (The Splendor of Jonathan)
This is what the episode of the Generation of the Dispersion was all about; that they were afraid of a Flood and accordingly sought to erect a tower up to the heavens. One has, however, to understand…
Open Rebuke
How, I ask you, could we have continued to be a nation until the present, and how could we have been able to walk such a great distance along the path of history without losing our unity or having our…