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.
Lullaby
Hush little baby. Forty-six years now
the night has rocked itself in my empty cradle
Now a gray head is rocked to sleep with the same tune:
Standing at the cradle’s head
No angel with two white wings…
Goyim in the Ghetto
There’s a folk saying: “The way it goes with the Christians, so it goes with the Jews.” Many concessions were made to the goyim, especially in matters concerning the ghetto. The guards at the ghetto…
Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman
D-Day at last. The invasion started about 1 a.m., and I have been listening to the radio since 8. My first reaction, and I’m sure everyone else’s—“Thank God, and God keep…
Suite Française
Madame Perrin told them that her son had died a hero’s death in Normandy as the Germans advanced; she had received permission to visit his grave. She complained at great length about the cost of this…
How?
How and with what will you fill
Your cup on the day you’re free?
Will you in your joy still
Hear the scream of the past
Where the skulls of chained days
Clot in bottomless pits?
Searching…
A Bowl of Raisins, or A Thousand and One Jokes
Jewish humor of recent generations, in all its manifestations—jokes, puns, witticisms, and anecdotes—has found patrons within Our Language [a Hebrew-language periodical] and already…
The Newly Arrived Men of Letters
The man of letters who cares about his links with the people—who is of the opinion that there is no backbone to his literary production except when his social source is present, typified by the…
The Artist and the Falafel
A mighty gust of a cruel wind slid down from Mount Carmel toward the street.
After having flooded its lights, its tumult and the aromas emanating from its restaurants, it continued making its way to…
The Crazy Book
Arab Halva—moist, sticky, fibrous. The taste tears across my lips like a memory. Within me Jaffa stirs, wakens from sleep; eyes and faces of Jaffa.
I am there, it is afternoon, a city half-awake…
The Joke
The body of a weary man is primed like an ambulance
Adrenaline charges through his hot blood.
I will go mad if we don’t end this now.
Bizarre how a man so blind with bits of coal
Can strike so…
Evening Descends
Again the herd throngs the village gateways
and dust rises up from the dirt roads.
And farther still a pair of clappers
keep pace with the lengthening shadows.
Evening descends, evening descends.
A…
The Legacy of German Jewry
German Jewry proved itself to be one of the most deeply characteristic and in every important respect fundamental representatives of the West, proving its mettle as partner in its two-thousand-year…