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.
The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine 1882-1948
Even in the narrative prose written by native Hebrew speakers towards the end of the 1940s, writers who hardly knew any foreign language and who were assuming positions at the center of the literary…
A Cosmic Jew
The old Bat Shlomo, the one to the south of the road, is a very small village, just a handful of old houses set among tall trees. Here and there a tractor is parked under an asbestos lean-to. Chickens…
Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Identity
We propose Diaspora as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination. To be sure, this would be an idealized Diaspora generalized from those situations in Jewish history…
The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology
In the beginning, the Lord God formed Adam and Lilith from the dust of the ground and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life. Created from the same source, both having been formed from the…
Principles of Spiritual Activism
Asked what the function of a rabbi is, Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk replied: “To redress the grievances of those who are abandoned and alone…
Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow
To be human is to remember. To lose memory is to lose a piece of ourselves. To lose all of memory is one of the great human tragedies; some part (though surely not all) of the divine light within us…
Herzl Observing the Rhine from the Balcony of Hotel Les Trois Rois during the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 in Basel
Ephraim Lilien’s photograph of Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern political Zionism, depicts him staring off into the distance like a lonely prophet. The congress in Basel in 1901 was the…
Simḥat Torah Flag
Flags like this, made of paper, decorated, and attached to a stick—sometimes with an apple and a small lit candle atop it—were commonly carried by children during Simḥat Torah celebrations. The…
Rebecca, or The Large Woman Carrying Water
By the mid-1920s, Zadkine had shifted from a purely cubist style to a new approach that drew on African and classical Greek art. His subject matter was often inspired by stories from the Bible and…
Leave Taking before Deportation
In January 1942, the Nazis began the large-scale deportations of Jews and Roma from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno killing center, where, by the end of that September, they had murdered about 70,000…