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.
An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy
In the spring of 1961, I flunked an exam that would have enabled me to write an honors thesis. In reality, it was a minor failure—I was spending most of my time at the Crimson building, where I was…
Volute Capital from Ramat Rahel Palace
The palm and the palmette are common iconographic elements in ancient Near Eastern art, appearing, for example, in ivory decoration (see Ivory and Bone Carvings and Engraved Seashells) and in Assyrian…
The Heavens and the Earth: A Self-Portrait of the 1948 Generation
The tale of the Generation of the Land is a sad tale. Reflecting about the source of the depression that the situation in Israel instills in me, I can only ascribe it to expressions of ethnocentric…
Local Notes
The Moshava of Pardes-Hannah is the place I come from, but since I left it, my eyes have been turned away from it, as if I couldn’t look at it. Until I went to the army, the Moshava was a whole place…
I’m Not Rappaport
Nat:Look at you! Look what you’ve become! Queen of the Condominiums, peasant skirts for two hundred dollars, betrayer of your namesake—Clara:Goddamn name—Nat:Clara Lemlich, who stood for something—Cla…
Two Ibexes
In this detail from the left side of a pithos (storage jar) from Kuntillet Ajrud, two ibexes are eating the flora of a schematic tree, all set above a striding lion. These common motifs are typically…
Silver Signet Ring
Silver signet ring with image of galloping griffin, a hybrid creature that consists of feline body and legs, avian head and wings, and serpentine tail. Found in a burial cave in the Ketef Hinnom…
Rattles
These hollow, spool-shaped terra-cotta objects from Beth Shemesh would hold one or more pellets (often small pebbles) that when shaken would produce a sound. They have been considered babies’ toys…
Dietary Laws: Animals and and Impurity
The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying to them: Speak to the Israelite people thus:
These are the creatures that you may eat from among all the land animals: any animal that has true hoofs, with…
Prophets
When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations. Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter…
A Ruling about Blasphemy and Talion
There came out among the Israelites one whose mother was Israelite and whose father was Egyptian. And a fight broke out in the camp between that half-Israelite and a certain Israelite. The son of…
Bequest of a House to a Daughter
On the 21st of Kislev, that is day 21 of Mesore, year 6 of Artaxerxes the king, Mahseiah son of Jedaniah, a Jew, hereditary-property-holder in Elephantine the fortress of the detachment of Haumadata…