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.
At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews
[…] Second-generation Jews, like their immigrant parents, succeeded in developing a nucleus of Jewishness, defined through secondary associations, that made being Jewish an impelling reality for their…
To Be a Jew in France in 1982
Confronted by difficult problems after 1945 (reconstruction of a community life after the physical and material losses of the Second World War, integration of successive and ever more numerous waves…
The Yellow Wind
I belong to the generation that celebrated its bar mitzvah during the Six-Day War. Then, in 1967, the surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire…
Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique
Leaving the museum, our small party walked the fifteen minutes out of the center of town it takes to get to the business end of Theresienstadt, the so-called “Small Fortress.” First constructed in the…
Head of a Young Jew (Self-Portrait)
Head of a Young Jew, Natan Altman’s most famous sculpture, is an expression of his desire to set a new, modern course for Jewish art. The asymmetrical sculpture, a combination of bronze, copper, and…
Tanakh Class in Jaffa
The Herzliya Gymnasium was the first modern Hebrew and Jewish national high school in Palestine. Founded by Zionist and Hebraist activists in 1905 in Jaffa and relocated to Tel Aviv soon after the new…
The Scholar, the Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil
Maurice Ascalon, sometimes called the father of modern Israeli decorative arts, was commissioned to create this sculpture for the façade of the Palestine Pavilion of the 1939 New York World’s Fair…
From the series Jewish Soldiers
This series by Helmar Lerski pictured Jewish soldiers fighting with the British Army during World War II—all in all, about a hundred men and women. All the portraits are in Lerski’s distinctive…
The Prayer
Jacques Lipchitz created The Prayer in 1943 to express his horror over the mass murder of Jews, which was then underway in Europe, reportedly crying as he made the statue. The central figure in The…
My Own
My lovely lady is like flights of scent—
the other day she opened like a flower—
She is beautiful as angels in the spring—
the other night her sun warmed my heart—
My lady’s lips are the single…