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.
Robert le diable
Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) is an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1827 and 1831. One of the first grand operas, it caused a sensation when it debuted at the Paris…
Letter against Zionism
With the Grace of God, Sunday, [the week of parshat] Beshalaḥ 5658 [1898], SighetTo my honorable friend, the famous sage, who is both rooted in the knowledge of [Torah from Mt.] Sinai and who uproots…
Sermon: On David and Jeroboam
To understand this parable [of David and Jeroboam in b. Sanhedrin 102], we must say that Rabba bar bar Ḥana also describes people of two different kinds, whose deeds and way of life are different from…
A Story of Rabbi Levi Yitsḥak of Berditshev
Once upon a time the tsadik Rebbe Levi Yitsḥak of Berditshev was in the city of Polonnoye, and an acquaintance approached him. He [the acquaintance] was an extremely poor man, with three sons and two…
The Woman Poet
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…
A Short History of Israel, Notes and Glosses
A hundred generations, yes, a hundred and twenty-five,
had the strength each day
not to eat this and that (unclean!)
not to say this and that,
not to do this and that (unjust!),
and with all this…
The Book of the Ghetto Wars: Between the Walls, in the Camps, in the Forests
The Book of the Ghetto Wars is intended to bring together a selection of the materials in our possession—testimony, journals and notes, documents, studies, poems, and stories—that were created during…
The Language of Faith: Selected Jewish Prayers
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…
Introduction to the Commentary on Numbers—Me’am Lo’ez
The introduction to the first volume of this work, which you already have, explains that one must know what mitzvot God commanded us to perform, and what he obliged us to avoid, to find…
Portrait of Menasseh Ben Israel
This engraving of famed intellectual Menasseh ben Israel, made by Shalom Italia, is one of the earliest known portraits of a Jewish thinker by a Jewish artist. Italia highlights Menasseh's scholarly…
The Mikve Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, Entrance
Mikve Israel-Emanuel is a synagogue that served the Spanish Portuguese Jewish community in Curaçao (and continues to function today as a Reconstructionist congregation). It is the oldest surviving…
Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
This edition of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was printed in Sabbioneta, Italy by Cornelio Adelkind for Tobias Foà. The twelfth-century work was an attempt to reconcile Aristotelianism with…