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.
To Remember, to Forget
I don’t know what possessed me, but I decided to take the guided tour of Frankfurt. The minute I set eyes on the American tourists and heard the practiced laugh with which the…
The Song of Friendship
On the Negev an autumn night falls
Surreptitiously igniting star after star
And as the wind crosses the threshold
Clouds spread over the path.
It’s been a year already. We hardly felt
How the times…
For Years I Wallowed
For years I wallowed about in the world,Now I’m going home to wallow there.With a pair of shoes and the shirt on my back,And the stick in my hand that goes with me everywhere.I’ll not kiss your dust…
Yerushalayim Shel Zahav
Among the dreamy pines
As evening light is slowly dying
And a lonely bell still chimes
So many songs, so many stories
The stony hills recall . . .
Around her heart my city carries
A lonely ancient…
Treblinka
Was there an element of cowardice in the attitude of the Jewish masses, who preferred to suffer the worst degradation rather than revolt? Given the terrible conditions created by the fierce anti…
Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood
[ . . . ] The two worlds, in my childhood, were not really separate. The synagogue in Graham Street, to which we walked across the Meadows every Saturday morning, was as much a part of the Edinburgh…
Things: A Story of the Sixties
For the first time they earned some money. They did not like their work; could they have liked it? But they did not dislike it a great deal either. They felt they were learning a lot from it. Year…
Shema
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust…
The Schlemiel as Modern Hero
[ . . . ] Modern Jewish humor grows from the tension of having to reconcile a belief as absolute as Elijah’s with an experience of failure as absolute as that of the priests of Baal…
The Second Scroll
And then—it was after I had returned from Tiberias to Tel Aviv to attend a literary soirée—then the creative activity, archetypical, all-embracing, that hitherto I had sought in vain, at last…
Yoine Bird
They were neighbors for many, many years. Thirty, forty, maybe half a century . . . ever since Colony D . . . was established back at the beginning of the eighteen-nineties.
Their parents grew up…
Bom Retiro, or The Childhood Neighborhood
Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, the so-called “Days of Awe” arrived.
There was no Jew in all of Bom Retiro who, God forbid, would ever think of not observing them. Any endeavor, no matter how important…