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 Jewish Tailor
A Jewish Tailor is one of Mark Antokolski’s earliest sculptures, created while he was still a student at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. The work appeared in an era of liberalization of tsarist…
The Future of the Jews: A Response to Werner Sombart
We want to scrape off the eggshells of the ghetto and live as children of the present in the midst of German intellectual life, but without breaking with our past and shaking off the legitimate…
The Face of East European Jewry
Is this the Jew of the East? Is he an old man, who, almost entirely removed from the present day and certainly removed from the future, lives a life that is limited to the most oppressed and narrowest…
On Matters of the Hour
Now I want to talk about the approach to the Arab question. When I was discussing Brit Shalom [Covenant of Peace], I asked: Can there be a common position of Zionists and non-Zionists on this question…
Women’s Farming Schools Abroad: Travel Notes and Impressions
This trip abroad to study the function of women’s agricultural schools was accomplished via a partnership of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce with the Humanitarian Society, which, at the end…
Soviet Russia as I Saw It
[ . . . ] We have heard so much about the achievements of the Evsektsiia [Jewish sections of the Communist Party] in the field of Jewish culture that for this alone many…
Prepared
A searing poetic response to a 1916 survey, by Martha Gruening, a tireless advocate for women’s rights and African American rights.
Yontev-bletlekh: “Why Is This Night Different (Ma nishtanah)?”
Passover is coming soon and I ask you to invite me to the seder. Let me in!I won’t cost you very much. I don’t eat kneydlekh! Don’t serve me maror, the bitter herbs—I was born with them!Do not ask me…
Rosh Hashanah Sermon for the Jewish Father
Assimilation in our day has spoiled and distorted the essence of our festivals. It has turned Rosh Hashanah into a day of festivity filled with the sound of music and song. However, the first day of…
The Mind of the Orient
All philosophy—understood in the widest sense as awe before and research into the inexplicable secrets and the inner coherence of the world—is meaningful not for the sake of knowledge but as a form of…
Ghingeli
Oh, Ghingeli, my bleeding heart,
Who is this guy who dreams in snow
And drags his feet like a pair of logs
In the middle of the street at night?
It is the rascal Moyshe-Leyb,
Who will freeze to…
Address to West Central Jewish Working Girls’ Club
Today for you all there is an opportunity more important than any that has ever before been given to you.
The boys out in France and Egypt are learning the value of their homes. We believe that they…