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.
Sargon II, Khorsabad Summary Inscription
I besieged and captured Samaria. I took as spoil 27,290 people who live there; I organized (a contingent of) fifty of their chariots and I instructed the rest of them in correct conduct. I appointed…
Portrait of Saul Tchernichovski
Saul Tschernikhovsky is considered one of the great modern Hebrew poets. His poems are part of the canon of Israeli literature, and his portrait appears on Israeli currency. Pasternak painted this…
The Golem
Great men were once able to perform great miracles.
When the ghetto of Prague was under attack and marauders wanted to rape the women, roast the children, and murder everyone, when it seemed that all…
Ha-‘akarah (The Barren Wife)
She was fourteen when she married him. She too was ornately dressed that day and sat on Preciado’s right. She too danced with him . . . Was not this her wedding night? —No, it is not!The fierce…
The Story of a Pretend Woman
Ulysses set out with Palamedes and arrived with him at the city of Aulis, on the beach of Boeotia, where the kings and captains, who had already reunited with their ships, received him with a great…
Metamorphosis
As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard, armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little, he could…
The Call of the Wandering Jew
Hot lava flows in my veins to-night,
My nerves are jangling mad,
The Joy of Life is a tinsel gaud,
The sweetest songs sound sad.
I feel the drag of the Wanderlust,
I see the ghosts stream by…
Red Stripe Kitchen
Red Stripe Kitchen is from Martha Rosler’s Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, a series created to protest the Vietnam War and the ways in which Americans distance themselves from violence…
The Jews of Hamadan in 1892
A Jewish girl, having been sent by her parents on an errand to a Jewish neighbour, was one day suddenly seized in the street by a Moslem and forcibly carried off to a Moslem house and compelled to…
Letter to Y. H. Brenner
More than once I began writing to you, and each time I took my pen in my hand I felt in my inner heart that in writing I will say nothing—to see you face to face, heart to heart, and to fall on each…
A Pogrom in Fez
We have awoken from a horrible nightmare that I believed myself unable to describe to you.
The sack of the Mellah [the Jewish quarter of the city] by the mutinous Sherifian troops began at midday on…
Yiddish Proverbs and Idioms
Some of the proverbs I have collected appeared previously in the yearbook Der hoyz-fraynd published by M. Spektor in Warsaw (1888–1889). The collection I am now presenting to the reader as…