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.
Bomberg Babylonian Talmud
Printing, which Jews adopted immediately after its invention, helped to unify far-flung communities. Where previously Jewish learning had been transmitted through the individual copying of manuscripts…
Illustration of an Armillary Sphere
This illustration of an armillary sphere is from a treatise on astronomy, Sefer mareh ha-ofanim (The Appearance of the Heavenly Beings), by Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor. The treatise was mostly a…
Remembrance
Remembrance was commissioned by Congregation Agudas Achim in Bexley, Ohio. The nine-foot-tall bronze sculpture depicts smoke rising from a crematorium, intertwined with the arm of a survivor…
Benches, Royal Park, Montreal, Canada
Jaffee was best known for his photographs of people and cityscapes. In this photograph of empty benches, seemingly arranged for viewing an unknown event, he saw both an enigma and an abstract…
Memorial
Memorial, like many of Bak’s paintings, evokes the ruins incurred by the Holocaust, in this case symbolized by the shards of shattered Jewish tombstones, possibly hinting at the two tablets of law. A…
The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment
The setting for The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment is modeled on a communal apartment in which Kabakov once lived in Moscow. The walls of the small, shabby space are papered with upbeat…
Razor
Weinfeld, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, produced artworks addressing the question of who she would have been if she had herself been a prisoner in a concentration camp? Would she have been…
Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside
Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside was rejected by the Venezuelan government as a contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale. The installation consisted of a small building, resembling the majority…
Dorothy A. Richman, Rabbinical Student, Jewish Theological Seminary
This portrait of Dorothy Richman, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, appeared in Leibovitz’s 1999 book, Women. Richman was one of the first female rabbinical…
Divre ha-yamim le-malkhe Tsarefat u-vet Otoman ha-Togar (Chronicle of the Kings of France and the Ottoman Empire)
There was a man in Castile called Americo. He had a large ship, in which he placed a great number of supplies, as much as his soul desired, and he also resolved in his heart to amass as much booty as…
Kitāb-i-anusī (The Book of the Forced Convert)
In the age of every ruler, old and new, time and again some affliction befell us. But this one was…
Devar sefatayim (Mere Words): On the History of Crimea
It was in the year 5457, which is the year 1109 in their calendar [1697 CE], in the month of Tevet, when the chill and the cold began and the water of the great river Ozo Sway [the Dnieper…