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.
Portrait
This is what he must have looked like,
Christ in the autumn, like me with my
twenty-two summers: still beardless,
blond, and the girls couldn’t help it,
dreamed of him night after night!
Translated…
Introduction to the Projected Anthology Auschwitz
All of us—dying here in polar, ice-cold indifference of nations, forgotten by the world and its hustle and bustle—have nonetheless felt the need to leave something for posterity: if not complete…
A Joyful Mother of Children
I entitled this volume Em Habanim Semeḥah [Psalms 113:9], based on the Jerusalem tractate of Berakhot (toward the close of the second chapter) which portrays Erets Yisrael as the mother of Israel and…
Yizkor, 1943
An elegy to the Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto from a Jew hiding on the “Aryan” side of the city.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Dearest Kitty,
Mr. Bolkestein, the Cabinet Minister, speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London, said that after the war a collection would be made of diaries and letters…
The Dreadful Angel
The dreadful angel in me is invisible
today, his screeching almost still.
You startle at its whisper. Is it
someone come to pay a visit
or a grasshopper tapping at the sill?
It’s he. Oh, he is…
In the Army
With evening a whistle. Again the sweating store room
opens its throat wide, and we march out in formation
worn down by the heat wave and a day so long:
hard working soldier-women.
And why should…
Essays on the Stories of Shai Agnon
In S. Y. Agnon’s comprehensive literary project, we must also see A Guest for the Night as an epic expansion on one central subject, whose tones burst out and rise from most of…
A History of the Jews in North Africa
[ . . . ] [A]n attempt will be made to present the history of the Jews of the African Maghreb, a large, well-defined diaspora which in some respects is different from other Jewish groups generally and…
The Message of the Scrolls
In late November 1947, in what had once been a quiet suburb of Jerusalem, I first heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was at the time Chief of Operations of Haganah, the Jewish underground self-defence…
House of Dolls
[ . . . ] There are moments when the pile of worn clothing in the center of the rag room bestirs itself suddenly like a volcano and sends a pervasive fear throughout the large room. The…
Saul and Johanna
All of a sudden, Grandmother’s empty burial plot is occupied. They finally returned mother to father’s side. One tree spreads its shadow over both their graves. Grandmother, too, finally gets what she…