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.
Notes in Response to the Zionist Cause
3 Shevat 5663 [January 31, 1903]
From all the Zionist essays emerge that which we see with our very eyes: their entire purpose and effort is to instill the supposition among Jews that the Torah and…
Vilna
Vilna, my great matriarch, an established Jewish city,
Jerusalem of the Exile, an ancient nation’s consolation in the north!
This [poem] is your patched kerchief, like the roof of the old synagogue,…
Buy Cigarettes!
Cigarettes! Cigarettes!
My voice rings through the streets
With eyes overcast, cloudy—
Buy! Buy! Buy!
Hunting foxes—Cossacks ride—
With horseshoes like scythes—
And cut down sounds like sheaves:
Buy…
Raḥel
Behold her blood flows in my blood,
Behold her voice within me sings—
Raḥel the herder of Laban’s sheep,
Raḥel—mother’s mother.
And so the house is too constricting for me
And the city—alien,
For…
Self-Portrait
When the cool, colorful, gentile Sundays come,
both sit—Valenti, the watchman from my courtyard
and his pock-marked, redmouthed, piggish old lady
back-to-back on a wooden bench.
Both of them gaze…
Russia: Anno 1905
A Young Jew. The weed of their hatred which has grown so tall
now turns towards us many heads,
many pointed petals and leaves;
what did they whisper to each other before the ikons,
and smile at over…
Jud’ Süss Oppenheimer on His First Visit with Professor Sigmund Freud
That’s you—the Eternal Jew.
Of Esau’s lullaby, of Gentile legend.
And I am your nephew—Jud’ Süss Oppenheimer.
You, seer, who can see far, see clear, see through,
You may say that I—am not I,
That one…
The Book of Valor
This book seeks to unfold before the reader the scroll of Jewish valor, in both Israel and the diaspora, from the destruction of the Hebrew state to the harbingers of the renaissance of the…
First Proclamation: 26 May 1941
A fire is now sweeping over the whole Old World, threatening to annihilate, heaven forbid, more than two-thirds of the Jewish people. Nobody can guarantee that the fire, heaven…
Corner of the Field
After a long stay in the city, I was glad to go out, to travel as far as the Sharon, full of eagerness for fields, colors, green light. But to my misfortune, I fell into a crowded bus, crammed…
Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages
This book is intended as a description of a “traditional society”—that is, a society that saw itself as based upon a body of knowledge and a set of values handed down to…
Transfiguration
In history class
I draw a Latin-American moustache
On Titus Aspasianus;
Miriam, who under her flannel shirt
Is beginning to show development,
Is making vulgar contours
Onto the sculpture of his bust…