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.
Hot Tea and Sponge Cake at 10:00 P.M.
My mother and father were an embarrassment to me, up until high school. They were much older than my friends’ parents (my dad was forty-seven and my mother was forty-four when I was born), and they…
Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective
The Central Conference of American Rabbis has on special occasions described the spiritual state of Reform Judaism. The centenaries of the founding of the Union of American Hebrew…
Adonay, Our People Have Called You
Adonay,
Our people have called You Monarch of the universe.
Help us who live without a monarch on a throne
To perceive Your sovereignty
In the royal splendor that pervades the universe,
In the holy…
Fund for Recruitment and Rescue Poster
This Hebrew-language poster urges Jews in Palestine to lend a hand to the rescue of Jewish refugees. During World War II, Jewish immigration to Palestine was banned by British Mandate authorities. A…
A Call for the Creation of a Sephardic Society for the Study of Jewish History and Culture
If there is one branch of study that is entirely neglected in our schools it is the history of our forefathers from the time of their dispersion across the globe until the present. . . . [True,] our…
Hasidism Encounters Reform and Produces Anarchism
The chief hypocrite of Russia who sold his soul and his ideas to the Hasidim for the price of 2,000 shekels wrote the following: “If any man says, I am a Jew in accordance with the law of Moses (Mende…
Factory near Pontoise
Camille Pissarro painted landscapes that, unusually for the time, included industrial elements, like this sugar-beet factory near Pissarro’s home in Pontoise. Like other impressionist paintings, this…
Robert le diable
Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) is an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1827 and 1831. One of the first grand operas, it caused a sensation when it debuted at the Paris…
Letter against Zionism
With the Grace of God, Sunday, [the week of parshat] Beshalaḥ 5658 [1898], SighetTo my honorable friend, the famous sage, who is both rooted in the knowledge of [Torah from Mt.] Sinai and who uproots…
Sermon: On David and Jeroboam
To understand this parable [of David and Jeroboam in b. Sanhedrin 102], we must say that Rabba bar bar Ḥana also describes people of two different kinds, whose deeds and way of life are different from…
A Story of Rabbi Levi Yitsḥak of Berditshev
Once upon a time the tsadik Rebbe Levi Yitsḥak of Berditshev was in the city of Polonnoye, and an acquaintance approached him. He [the acquaintance] was an extremely poor man, with three sons and two…
The Woman Poet
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…