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.
Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood
Stanislaw often told me how much he liked my company, and sometimes he wondered about my Jewishness: “Look at yourself! You cannot be Jewish!” he would exclaim. And yet whenever he spoke to me about…
Out of Egypt
Egyptian Jewish American author André Aciman describes celebrating his last Seder in Egypt with his bags packed to leave his homeland for good.
No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War
I thought of the beautiful angel in the picture that had hung over our bed before the war. Her giant wings hovering over, almost enveloping two children crossing a bridge over a ravine. Please make my…
Beses and Lyre Player
This detail appears on the right side of a pithos (storage jar) from Kuntillet Ajrud. The two Bes figures on the lower left are unrelated to the lyre player in the upper right. Bes was a minor…
The War against the Jews, 1933-1945
“The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was the code name assigned by the German bureaucracy to the annihilation of the Jews. The very composition of the code name, when analyzed, reveals its…
Jehu on Obelisk of Shalmaneser III
The panel shown here is part of an obelisk that contains a long inscription summarizing the triumphs of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 BCE) until the thirty-third year of his reign. The…
Germans, Journals, and Jews/Madison, Men, Marxism and Mosse: A Tale of Jewish-Leftist Identity Confusion in America
[…] the Madison Left experience, at least in the early and mid-1960s, was never simply an American experience. It was more jumbled, at least more composite—like America itself? In my own not untypical…
Our Homeland, the Text
Successive, often polemic interpretations, citations in a context of sacred doctrine or of political-historical opportunity, construe, around the archaic, cardinal words in the Hebrew canon, a…
The Raid
He was late.
Under normal circumstances, she would have considered it a minor annoyance, a matter of a dinner grown cold, or a delay in helping the children with their homework, or an errand that…
Poles and Jews
When Jan Gross’ Neighbors first appeared in Poland two years ago, with its grisly account of the July 10, 1941, slaughter of 1,600 Jews in the small northeastern town of Jedwabne, it sank like a stone…