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.
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…
Nahalat Binyamin Street, Tel Aviv
Nahalat Binyamin Street was the longest road in the city during Tel Aviv’s earliest years. In the 1920s, it was paved and became Tel Aviv’s main commercial street. Over the next few decades, new…
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…
Illustration to Sholem Aleichem, “The Haunted Tailor”
Sholem Aleichem’s grotesque story “The Haunted Tailor” tells of a poor, witless tailor who is sent on a mission to buy a milk-giving goat, who turns out to be possessed. In the Soviet Union, it was…
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…
Medal in Honor of the Grand Sanhedrin of Napoleon
Engravers Alexis Joseph Depaulis and Augustin Dupré collaborated on this remarkable Napoleonic-era medal that honored the Grand Sanhedrin, a representative body of seventy-one rabbis and Jewish…
Letter to A. Neubauer at Oxford University
To his excellency, the great sage, the learned and famous rabbiAdolf H. Neubauer, the Head LibrarianOf the Government Library in Oxford, England! My dear Sir and Rabbi!Although I have not hitherto…
Hear, O Israel!
I want to profess straight off that I am a Jew. Does it require justification if I write in a spirit other than that of defending the Jews? Many of my fellow tribesmen know themselves only as Germans…