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.
Corner of the Field
After a long stay in the city, I was glad to go out, to travel as far as the Sharon, full of eagerness for fields, colors, green light. But to my misfortune, I fell into a crowded bus, crammed…
Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages
This book is intended as a description of a “traditional society”—that is, a society that saw itself as based upon a body of knowledge and a set of values handed down to…
Transfiguration
In history class
I draw a Latin-American moustache
On Titus Aspasianus;
Miriam, who under her flannel shirt
Is beginning to show development,
Is making vulgar contours
Onto the sculpture of his bust…
Nostalgia
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget itself.Give us the land we have wandered in timeThrough foreign parts, far, so far and then,Every year at Passover we repeat the lineNext year…
Does the Jew Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play about Anti-Semitism
In considering Sartre’s conception of the Jew and his relation to anti-Semitism we must not forget that Reflections on the Jewish Question (published by Schocken as Anti-Semite and Jew) was written…
Europe and America
My father brought the emigrant bundle
of desperation and worn threads,
that in anxiety as he stumbles
tumble out distractedly;
while I am bedded upon soft green money
that grows like grass.
Thus…
A Story of What Happened to Rav Moshe Danon and the Elders of the Jewish Community of Sarajevo on 20 October 1819
Let us recount a story of the old days, of what happened to a great man who lived then.
He was our Rav Danon,
may his name endure forever.
We will not forget him ever,
We will extol him before God,
f…
Pe’at ha-shulhan (Edge of the Table)
I cannot refrain from relating an amazing, true story that I heard from that mouth of sanctity, the most outstanding disciple of our Holy Master, the rebbe, my dear friend—may…
Tseror perahim (A Bouquet of Flowers)
I had recently published my work Ḥeker davar, and for other reasons, I was compelled to seek out the city of my birth, Vilna, and…
Scroll of the Book of Esther
Moses ben Abraham Pescarol’s illuminated scroll of Esther, completed in Ferrara, constitutes one of the oldest examples of an illustrated manuscript of this biblical book, which is chanted on the…
Scroll of the Book of Esther
Moses ben Abraham Pescarol’s illuminated scroll of Esther, completed in Ferrara, constitutes one of the oldest and most unusual examples of illustrated manuscripts of this biblical book, which is…
Silver Purim Cup
On this silver Purim cup from Augsburg, Germany, a quotation from the Talmud (b. Megillah 7b) inscribed around the rim advises its bearer to drink in celebration of Purim until unable to distinguish…