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.
Some Aspects of Chabad Chassidism
As in the case of Israel and the Torah, so in the case of G-d there are the apparent or conceivable attributes, and the hidden or inconceivable attributes.What is conceivable of the Divine Being is…
Jewish Ethnopoetics
Dedicated to my sister and friend Sarah Rappoport
A people’s poetry depicts, vividly and in clear relief, the hidden inner world of national life, to which we are admitted neither by the pen of the…
How Does One Produce Culture?
When the [Yiddish language] culture conference gathered in Czernowitz [in September, 1908], I was against it. When the culture conference gathered in Berlin, I voiced my doubts about it. Now that a…
Responsum: On Gender Transition
Question: Is a proper get [divorce certificate] necessary in the following circumstance: a certain man married a young Jewish woman, and was with her in the manner of men and women, but after some…
Ruth
On these night fields of pure silence
My feet tread, light and sure, as upon
A homeland’s holy soil from the day
My star led me here.
How loving are the night’s wings! My eye
Discerns every bush here…
Autobiography
Yesterday, I dumped on my son the following story:
That my father was a cyclops and, of course, had one eye,
That my fifteen brothers wanted to devour me,
So, I barely got myself out of their…
Romance of the Gambler’s Girls
Reb Menashe Dorogofsky
what beautiful girls you have!
the brunette enchants me,
also, the red-head.
The trampled plants of our century
spring again from their feet
the curve of the Hebrew sky
which…
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…