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.
Old Wooden Synagogues in Polish Lithuania
Drawing of a wooden synagogue from Maximilian Syrkin’s 1910 article, “Drevníya derevyannyye sinagogi v pol’she litve” (Wooden Synagogues in Polish Lithuania). Wooden synagogues were a common form of…
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Venice
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy.Born in Pittsburgh, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was brought up in Oakland, California. She graduated from Radcliffe College in…
Letter to Shmuel Niger on the New Jewish Book
Deeply respected Niger,I ask you to endure me in Russian.I want to express to you my happiness that we are approaching the time of the new Jewish book, a book created with love towards [the thing]…
The Two Voyages of Gulliver
To the Lilliputians and to the Giants
Translated and adapted from Jonathan Swift by Alexandre Benghiat.
The prince of that place, who saw and liked me, bought me from my master, and I was taken to…
Hasan-Pasha the Terrible
But the moment he disembarked in Kostan, he was seized and thrown into the bottom of the prison in Yedikule. In this terrible prison, which people entered only to die, he was thinking of his great…
To the Readers of Literarishe monatsshriften
Literature cannot survive, cannot develop freely and expansively, if it depends on an underdeveloped reader, if it satisfies the spiritual-aesthetic needs only of those who have no access to the…
Dreyfus
[Fabres alone]Fabres [Standing, reading the newspaper La Libre parole whose title appears in such big letters that it can be seen by the audience]:“Our information was confirmed in…
Portrait of Heinrich Heine
A German romantic poet and essayist, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was born in Düsseldorf. Unsuccessful in his early business career, he studied law, and settled in Berlin in 1821. There he met with…
She’elot u-teshuvot yeshanot (Old Responsa): On Marital Deception
This rabbinic responsum, a “response” to a question of Jewish law, addresses the issue of marital deception and its legal ramifications.
Portrait of Dr. Ephraim Hezekiah Bueno
Rembrandt van Rijn lived in the part of Amsterdam where the artists’ guild (St. Luke’s Guild) was located. By coincidence, it was also home to a number of Jews. Rembrandt’s artworks attest to an…
Gravestone of Mordechai Margaliot
Moses Mordechai Margaliot (d. 1617) was a member of a family descended from the illustrious medieval scholar Rashi. Margaliot served as a rabbi in Kraków. He was buried in the cemetery of the Rema…
Great Italian Synagogue, Padua
Founded in 1548, the Italian Synagogue of Padua was moved to its current location by 1603. It was renovated in the nineteenth century and restored again after World War II, when the Scuola Grande…