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.
Israeli Blues
“Secular is a terrible word”; “secular is a word I don’t like,” “there is no such thing as a secular Jew”—these clichés are common among absolutely secular intellectuals when they discuss problems of…
Facing Reality: Lessons from Jeremiah, the Destruction of the Second Temple, and Bar Kochba’s Rebellion
Is the Jewish existence so hollow and frail that it took hundreds of thousands of human victims in order to consolidate it, as the claim that the Bar Kochba rebellion ensured our continuity would seem…
May Women Wear Tefillin?
A recent discussion of our question concludes as follows:
In conclusion, women are not permitted under any circumstances to wear tefillin. In view of the fact that the Rema, the…
The Essence of Baseball Explained for Non-Sportsmen
Illustration of a baseball diamond in a short primer on the game of baseball published in the summer of 1909 in the Yiddish-daily Forverts (Forward). Some of the words in the picture are…
Almanac for the Year 5675
This calendar, Almanac for the Year 5675: Souvenir der Hochschule Bar Iochai und Altenhaus in Miron, was probably a fundraising giveaway for an old-age home and for the high school that Eliezer Ya…
Phat’hi’s Treasure
I stood outside the grocery, holding a shopping bag in one hand, and Phat’hi’s strange “letter” in the other. I looked at the drawings of the car, the clock, and the sign over…
Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture
Gathering the sources was a modern way of closing ranks, of reaffirming the essential unity of Jewish experience as one vale of tears through space and time. The harder the times, the more desperately…
Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach
On a very hot summer’s day, at noon, I am in the kibbutz in which both my father, who died in 1972, and my brother-in-law, who was killed in the…
Genealogies of Two Wandering Hebrew Melodies
It is well known that tunes of songs, no less than their texts, often provide an historical mirror of an exceedingly sharp focus. A special category of such songs are the so- called “migrating” or…
Declaration of Yom Kippur War
Citizens of Israel, today, at around 2 p.m., the armies of Egypt and Syria launched an attack against Israel. They carried out a series of attacks from the air, with armor and artillery, in Sinai and…
Taste of Life
Scholars say the cultivated olive originated in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean lands, including the Land of Israel.
In the Bible, the olive is first…
Souls, Inc.
This poster was created for Komar and Melamid’s We Buy and Sell Souls, a conceptual art project the Soviet artists launched soon after their emigration to the United States. They formed a corporation…