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.
Tefillin
In Jewish tradition, the command to “bind them [God’s words] as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead” is understood as requiring passages from the Torah to be written on…
The Family Tree
I have a lovely period photo, sepia coloured, with all the characters in a row, and their gentle trusting faces, photograph faces that nobody ever looks at now. They are the shifbrider, the ship…
Ashlar Masonry Wall in Samaria Acropolis
The masonry in the royal palace of Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom, is considered the finest example of ashlar masonry from the Iron Age. The blocks are cut so well that they fit together…
Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism
Among the very few possessions my parents were permitted to take with them when they emigrated as refugees from Austria to Bolivia in June 1939 was a box camera and two family photo…
Number the Stars
The officer stared at them grimly.
“Now,” Mama said in a strong voice, “you have seen that we are not hiding anything. May my children go back to bed?”
The officer ignored her. Suddenly he grabbed a…
Coin with Ear
The image of an ear on this coin may symbolize God as the one who hears prayers, as in passages such as Psalm 34:16, 18, and Psalm 130:2. The image is paralleled on Egyptian stelas that depict…
Figures Looking over City Wall
These fragments of a mural from Kuntillet Ajrud show two human heads, facing left and looking out over their city’s wall, which is flanked by towers. The mural may have been part of a military scene…
Who Shall Bear Guilt for the Holocaust?
A simple searing truth emerges from the vast body of research and writing on the Holocaust. It is that European Jewry was ground to dust between the twin millstones of a murderous Nazi intent and a…
Justice and Judicial Procedures
You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall…
Fringes
The Lord said to Moses as follows: Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of…
Imposition of a Judicial Oath
On the 18th of Phaophi, year four of Artaxerxes the king in Elephantine the fortress, Malchiah son of Jashobiah, an Aramean, hereditary-property-holder in Elephantine the fortress of the detachment of…
The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity
Some time ago, as I sat down to work in a Tel Aviv café in the area where I live, an elderly man suddenly approached me. “You are the son of Eliahu Shaharabani, of blessed memory,” he said, half…