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.
Guidelines for the Study of the Warsaw Ghetto
- WorkersHandicraft and small industry: guilds (tsekhn)Trade and industry under Aryan trusteesFree professions: doctors, lawyers…
An Epistle to Hebrew Youth
The Committee for the Consolidation of Hebrew Youth appeals to you only in order that you understand the very essence of what is in common between you and the rest of Hebrew youth, which operates in…
The Universalism of the Chosen People
In what sense is Judaism racist? Does it in general recognize the “holiness” of race and if so, what practical deductions have Jews made from such a theory?
In connection with the Nazi racist…
The Butterfly
He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true color.
And how easily he climbed, and how high.
Certainly, climbing…
And in That Drowning Instant
And in that drowning instant
as the water heightened over me
it suddenly did come to pass
my preterite eternity
the image of myself intent
on several freedoms
fading to
myself in yellowed Basle…
God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children
God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children—less.
But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach…
To the Sons Who Were Banished from Their Fathers’ Tables
My father, my father, how you stood over me
Against childhood sorrows and the agony of years.
You raised children, father, and also great hopes,
and in return received nothing but despair and woes.
…
Written in Pencil on a Sealed Box-Car
here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i
The Idea Remains
Since the song of victory is silent
About the man now overcome.
I will serve as Hector’s witness.
There once was a Germany, we all know it, that belonged to the world, and that was received by the…
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
The events of 1968 therefore came as a shock to me. [ . . . ]
One could of course continue to claim that it was not the people but only those horrible communists, those monstrous rulers, who with…
“Prélude,” Abishag
For my daughter Nedjéand for her husband Armand Bengui.Where word and spirit make feeling divineI see creation and I see poetry . . .But I know I risk the sin of heresyIf I say the words and spirit…
Studies in Prejudice
At this moment in world history anti-Semitism is not manifesting itself with the full and violent destructiveness of which we know it to be capable. Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence…