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.
A Birthday in London
Mr. Lumbik was the first guest to arrive, rather too early. He had a big bunch of flowers in tissue paper, and wore a tweed jacket with leather buttons, which gave him a jaunty air. “A happy birthday…
Can I?
I just can’t. Should I? I feel like going in, but I just can’t; I remain stationary. The church door opens and closes, continually, and I open and close with it, split asunder. Warmth escapes from…
The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
This is a book about East European Jews in crisis, challenge, and creativity from the end of the eighteenth century until their cataclysmic destruction in the Second World War.
In the sixteenth…
Persecution and the Art of Writing
In most of the current reflections on the relation between philosophy and society, it is somehow taken for granted that philosophy always possessed political or social status. According to F arabi…
The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: An Historical and Theological Introduction
A natural history of the Jewish mind is impossible. The Jewish mind, as a natural and empirical phenomenon, is an absurdity. It consists in but the pale images of…
Jewish Dreams and Nightmares
The case of Kafka, the acculturated Jew, shows how a man may feel his way into a body of collective history through his very consciousness of being outside it: Kafka brooded over the experience of the…
Passage from Home
Father glared; Willy smiled. Father sat erect, his skullcap square on his head; Willy slouched, all relaxed, his cap slung at an angle like a beret. One declaimed the Hebrew text, loudly…
Compulsion
We waited half through the night, with the news leaking out to us. The confessions were going well. The time was long because the state’s attorney was going over each fact, nailing down the evidence…
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
They went down in the elevator, the grey woman and Mr. Sammler, and through lower passages paved in speckled material, through tunnels, up and down ramps, past laboratories and supply rooms. Well…
Megilat sefer (The Scroll of the Book)
I was the fourth [child] born and the first son, a tender darling to my father and my mother (cf. Prov. 4:3) after my mother had given birth to three daughters. My parents were worriers and trembled…
Register of a Jewish Midwife
This is the book of the generations/children of man, those that were born by my hands among the Hebrew women. I came to them, I the midwife, for they are vital [Exodus 1:15–19] and give birth to a son…
The Escape: A Tale of 1755
A moment of agonized suspense and Alvar Rodriguez stood at the window, the bar he had removed in his hand. He let down the string, to which Hassan’s now trembling hands secured the ladder and drew it…