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.
White Crucifixion
White Crucifixion was the first of several paintings that Chagall made in which Jesus represented Jewish suffering. His use of Christian imagery was controversial, but he was not the first Jewish…
Portrait of Peretz Hirshbein
By the 1920s, Montparnasse artist Chana Orloff was a popular portrait sculptor. Showing the influences of cubism and classical and “primitive” art, her flowing, smooth-surfaced sculptures in wood or…
Masadah
On an autumn night, on a bed of sorrows, far from home and shattered hearth,
My mother died;
A last tear froze in her eyes as she gasped a dying blessing
To me, her son, setting forth…
The Vengeance of the Fathers
From here to the shrine of Nabi Moussa was some twenty-five miles. Allah, wanting to placate his favorite, and mitigate the punishment which He had imposed on him in His anger, had…
Battles
It is often said that among the Gentiles there are men of noble lineage whose features and outward appearance show that nothing but the purest and most refined aristocratic blood…
Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem
Holy grandmothers in Jerusalem,
May your virtue protect me.
The smell of blossoms and blooming orchards
I suckled with my mother’s milk.
Feet soft as hands, fumbling
In the torrid sand,
And tousled…
At Heaven’s Gate
When “Papa” Gonta bore down on Tetayev at the head of his Cossack army in the summer of 1768, the little town had a strange look about it: the houses large and small stood desolate, their shutters…
Three Donkeys
Three donkeys from Beersheba, so they say,
Plodded slowly down the road to Dan one day.
One brown, one black, one white, they went their way.
The three passed by a minaret, and there
The black one…
Eagle, Eagle!
Eagle! Eagle on your hilltops, eagle flying o’er your hills!
Slow and buoyant—it seems a moment—only floating as it wills;
Floating, sailing through blue seas, hearing notes of sung delight
Filling…
To the Sun
Hyacinth and mallow was I to God: lifelong
Only this pure sun fills, for each, the earth,
And an angel urges: “Bud, child, and bring forth
Among the biting thorns, your festive song.”
The damp…
Breakdown and Bereavement
It was an afternoon in the middle of April when the accident occurred. The year was a leap year, rainy and warm, and on that summery spring day in the commune he had already been given the job of…
Married Life
On his way home Gurdweill tried without success to find the reason for Lotte’s strange behaviour. He went over everything he had said in her house in his mind: there was nothing that could have…