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.
Sefer ha-ḥayim (The Book of Life)
In which it is explained that the essence of the Torah is the performance of the commandments, not intellectual knowledge; and also the reason why it is called the Talmud…
Letter to Jarig Jelles
From B. d. S.
[Dear Friend],
As far as Politics is concerned, the difference you ask about, between Hobbes and me, is this: I always preserve natural Right…
Letter to Isaiah Bassan
O great mountain (Zechariah 4:7), the exalted and raised (Isaiah 52:13), precious cornerstone (Isaiah 28:16), my teacher, my rabbi, may the Merciful One guard and bless him, may God protect him and…
Epitaphs
I have set this stone as a weight, not as a memorial, over my wife’s grave, lest (God forbid!) she rise from the dead and come back home.
Shilte ha-giborim (Shields of the Mighty)
The kinnor, called in a foreign tongue arpa (harp), is a wooden instrument made in the likeness of a wide-open entrance without their being doors on it, and its upper threshold is broad and its lower…
The Lover
And then I heard the singing. Chanting, prayer, live voices, not from the transistor. It wasn’t yet light, just the first flutterings of dawn. Shivering with cold, wrapped in our blankets, wet with…
The Book of Abraham
The ten years that followed the arrival of Abraham and Beatrice in Lublin were peaceful and therefore happy, thanks to the Almighty, blessed be He. Abraham and Kalonymos gradually improved the print…
Harlem Holocaust
But all this came to an end one night. In almost every one of his novels, Warszawski retells the scene in the winter of 1944 when he came home at three o’clock in the morning, after a night of dancing…
Happy Times, Brittle World
Leo was planning to ask his father for money to get his car fixed, perhaps as a birthday present, even though he was sure his parents already had a present for him. Since the family’s return to Vienna…
Ghost Stories
Superimposed upon my face in the mirror is my mother’s. I am about to comb my hair, but here she is, brushing hers, her thick, wavy, white hair.
We quarrelled about hair.
“D…
Journey to the End of the Millennium
From the corner of his eye, Rabbi Elbaz now observed the anxiety in Ben Attar’s face receding somewhat, and a short row of white teeth gleaming in the smile of a merchant who finally sees the hope of…