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.
Self-Criticism
The skeptics and rebels who have just recently appeared in our literature say: What? The Jews have survived? Yes, it’s true they have survived. But, my friends, survival alone is not yet a virtue…
Feminist Manifesto
The feminist movement as at present instituted is InadequateWomen if you want to realize yourselves—you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval—all your pet illusions must be unmasked…
Studies in Judaism
The purpose in view was, as may easily be gathered from the essays themselves, to bring under the notice of the English public a type of men produced by the Synagogue of the…
Ghetto Twilight
An infinite weariness comes into the faces of the old tenements,
As they stand massed together on the block,
Tall and thoughtful silent,
In the enveloping twilight.
Pensively,
They eye each other…
Responsum: On Prostitutes’ Gifts to the Synagogue
Concerning the matter of prostitutes from the daughters of Israel—far be it from our straight paths—who dedicate a new ark curtain or Torah scroll cover, it is permissible from a legal point of view…
Day and Night
Day and night—
Shivering, we wait in bitter day
For moonlit night,
For the caressing moon.
Quivering, we wait in angry night—
For the sunlit day,
For the warming sun.
Day and night—
We must loom…
Transformation
Year after year, that cruel monster in the heart
growing, sense of guardedness expanding.
Year after year—generations’ blessing
gouged like a needle into the body.
I have wrenched it with irons…
Friends of My Age!
Friends of my age,
My happy generation,
We strode, pained-pleased,
Through the wreckage of whole worlds.
Before the living and the dead
fell on our portion
Inherited old skins
of ourselves—and…
A Series of Verses to the Venerable Ancient Whose Portrait Hangs in the Window of a Lottery Agency
The Avenida de Mayo
glows with a virginal light beneath the Sabbath sky.
That light strikes
the window pane that displays your portrait:
Laban amidst a flock of gaily colored lottery
tickets, green…
Tropic Nightmare in Singapore
Seven continents, seven seas,
and two and forty years—
and torrid equatorial nights
filled with nightmare fears.
Open eyes, naked heart.
And draining blood from me,
mosquitoes buzzing, buzzing…
The New World
A new world being made—one hears
In childhood that it has begun;
Then comes the passage of the years—
Is it not yet fully done?
The new world being made—always,
From childhood on—and on the day
The…
Lord I Have Seen Too Much
Lord, I have seen too much for one who sat
In quiet at his window’s luminous eye
And puzzled over house and street and sky,
Safe only in the narrowest habitat;
Who studies peace as if the world were…