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.
Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew
At the end of King George Boulevard stood a tall building with two black, cavernous entrances. It served as a brothel, first for Arabs and later for Allied troops. When passing in front of this…
The Temple of Solomon
These two modern depictions of the Temple built by King Solomon on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem are based on biblical descriptions and pertinent archaeological evidence from other sanctuaries and…
Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust
There was a rumpled old Polish man who boarded in the apartment of our building’s superintendent. With baggy pants, fraying suspenders, a wrinkled hat, and a wooden cane, he looked like the lovable…
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
Sally and her friends were in the playhouse in Sally’s backyard. It wasn’t a baby kind of playhouse for dolls. It was a big sturdy house that her father and Douglas had built. It was painted white…
A Procession
In this detail from a pithos (storage jar) from Kuntillet Ajrud, five people stand with raised forearms (their hands are not depicted). As raised hands usually signify praying, the scene may represent…
Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic
[…] That we in Israel are in need of a dose of Jewish soul—that this, as much as sheer survival, with which it is in no small way connected, is a pressing issue of our existence—I readily concede. But…
Conquest of Lachish Depicted on Relief of Sennacherib
This relief, from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh, shows Sennacherib’s army attacking Lachish (an event alluded to in 2 Kings 18:14 and 17). Sennacherib is sitting on his throne outside the city…
Prohibition of Eating Blood
And if anyone of the house of Israel or of the strangers who reside among them partakes of any blood, I will set My face against the person who partakes of the blood, and I will cut him off from…
Family Laws
If a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, but the first-born is the son of the unloved one—when he wills his property to his…
A Ruling about Inheritance by Daughters
The daughters of Zelophehad, of Manassite family—son of Hepher son of Gilead son of Machir son of Manasseh son of Joseph—came forward. The names of the daughters were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah…
The Place of the Bible in Israeli Society
The Bible, once at the center of the cultural scene, has become marginalized, its magic has faded. A new Israeli generation no longer believes that, to be considered educated, one must be well-versed…