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.
Kol sakhal (Voice of a Fool)
Kol sakhal (Voice of a Fool), a polemical work attacking rabbinic Judaism, has been the subject of many scholarly debates. To this day, its composition and aims remain shrouded in mystery. The author…
They call him Meir
When I heard that Meir the teacher had exchanged his glory for futility, I said:
They call him Meir, but he has no light, for all the lights around him have gone dim.
Indeed, he has a thick cloud…
Her Hair
O peerless beauty, veil your hair, lest you play havoc with the world, without lifting a finger! They are famous throughout the world, they ring in the ears of all who hear of them. The weakest…
To His Gadabout Wife
Only three exits are becoming to every woman, big or small. The first is when she exits from the womb, dirtied, as if from a deep swamp. The second is when she exits from her woman’s tent and enters…
Like the Root
You’ve grown
but not
grown up
You’re ripe
as earth is raw
where roots probe deep
Like all roots
you probe
in deep darkness
Translated by Marcia Falk.
Exercises in Practical Hebrew
“Are you at peace? Hast thou killed and also taken possession?”
(examples of interrogative sentences in a grammar book)
Vishniac’s Windows
How long this staring through a window
In an alley-way by few remembered,
Into the obscure, into a room
Empty of all but its walls
Where pictures hang all in shadow
But for one of mild eyes wide,
As…
Model Bed
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 with Grazing Griffin
The griffin on this black stone seal found in Jerusalem has a bovine body. Its wings are held out and down.
The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust
What can we do to ensure that Holocaust memory not only views male suffering but also recognizes women’s special and separate agony?
The 1948 Generation: Myth, Profile and Memory
Berl Katznelson did much to foster the awareness of “Yizkor” and its literature in the twenty years after Tel Hai, through an explicit reference to the chain of Jewish martyrology and heroism and a…
No Exit from This Jewry
I—a Jewess—am by definition not a member of the species, or: why should a Jewess not have problems with public assistance and with her children? The postwar German Jew, to the extent that such a being…