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.
Engraved Clam Shell
Engraved tridacna (clam) shells like this one from Arad seem to have been used as cosmetic containers in the Near East and Mediterranean worlds in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE. This…
Memoirs of a Jewish Colonist
I. Of Pimps, Prostitutes, and Other SeducersWe saw some ten richly-dressed women, accompanied by fat-bellied men in top hats, standing at the green metal gate of the immigrants’ hotel. Through the…
It’s Not Easy to Start Living
He was learning about the Jewish festivals from Leo. The arrival of the new year was suddenly upon him, and that’s when he decided that fasting on Yom Kippur would be a fine adventure. The…
On Literature and the State
Our state is young, with a girl’s years, just fourteen. Still without her shoes, as the poet says. But she seems old, many generations old. In these few years, old age has pounced on her. No one is…
Diary Entry: On Being a Jew
January 8. Lecture by [Leo] Fantl on Goldhaupt, “he tosses the enemy like a barrel.”
Insecurity, dryness, tranquility, in these everything will pass.
What do I have in common with Jews? I have…
La Ronda en El Tiempo
La Ronda en el tiempo, now in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, is considered Fanny Rabel’s most important mural. On the left, children play with toy…
Orchestra
Mané-Katz may have painted this picture of a traditional Jewish klezmer band from memory, from his childhood in the Russian Empire. By the late 1940s, his previously dark palette had begun to shift to…
De verwoeste stad (“The Destroyed City”), 1953, Plein 1940, Rotterdam
Ossip Zadkine first conceived of Der verwoeste stad (“The Destroyed City”) in 1946 when he saw the utter devastation in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which had been heavily bombed by Nazi Germany in…
And the Bush Was Not Consumed
Herbert Ferber’s twelve-foot-high sculpture was originally commissioned to adorn the façade of Congregation B’nai Israel in Milburn, New Jersey. Percival Goodman, the new building’s architect…
Self-Portrait, Parramatta River, Sydney
Margaret Michaelis-Sachs stands with her back to the camera, looking out on a landscape seemingly devoid of other people. The photographs she made in Australia were different from the lively street…
Lower Eastside Façade
Erika Stone’s photography frequently features odd juxtapositions. Here, the face of a woman on a huge advertisement painted on the brick wall of a tenement building provides a striking contrast with…
Sport
Zoltan Kluger was one of the most influential and prolific photographers in Palestine and, after the establishment of the state, during the first decade of Israel’s existence, as attested to by his…