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 Lovely Song about an Event in Hamburg
Which tells how a certain man took up with a prostitute in Hamburg, his first wife hearing of this came from Poland, how he was forced to give her a writ of divorce and this almost cost him his life…
Couplets of Joseph the Righteous
“It is only because the Lord was with us,”
says the old Israel;
in You lies holiness,
Israel’s praises.
“It is only because the Lord was with us,”
You elevated us above other men,
You saved us from…
Introduction: Salamone de Rossi’s Ha-shirim asher li-Shelomoh (The Songs of Solomon)
May the language of truth be established forever, or as the poet …
Counting the Omer
Leiba recognized that Fraydel was in danger of disappearing down the well of her own thoughts.
Fraydel was a secret keeping herself from the world. When she spoke, it was yet another way of keeping…
The Status Quo
[…] Must we conclude that Israeli society is doomed to experience a Kulturkampf, and that the Zionist synthesis is marching ineluctably toward its undoing? Before answering that question, let us…
This Month Is for You: Observing Rosh Hodesh as a Woman’s Holiday
Rosh Hodesh is celebrated only eleven times a year. Tishre, the month Rosh Hodesh coincides with Rosh Hashanah, is omitted. If Rosh Hodesh falls on two days, the ceremony may…
Kreuzer Sonata Advertisement
A Portuguese-language advertisement for February 5–6, 1915, performances in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of the Grande Companhia Israelita’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s novella The Kreuzer Sonata.
Portrait of Yitzhak Katzenelson
Yitzhak Katzenelson (1885–1944) was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet from Łódź who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he was extraordinarily prolific as a poet, playwright, translator and public…
The Avenue de l’Opéra, Sunlight, Winter Morning
In late 1897, Camille Pissarro, the noted impressionist artist, known for his many landscapes and cityscapes, came to Paris and rented a room in the Hôtel du Louvre, which gave him a good view of the…
Little Hans: Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy
The first reports about Hans date to the time when he wasn’t yet three years old. At that time, he demonstrated—in various ways of talking and asking—a particularly vivid interest in that part of the…
Memories of the Meldar: An Ottoman Jew’s Early Education
Did you go to a meldar as a child? Have any of you been so lucky and blessed? I am sure that, seeing these two questions, you will all object that you had no idea what a meldar was and that you went…