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.
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…
Temple Beth El (Detroit)
Alfred Kahn’s grand classical revival synagogue on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue attracted many new members to Temple Beth El, the oldest congregation in Michigan, where Kahn was a member. The…
Uncle Misha’s Partisans
“At night the wolves were roaming the forest. By day the Germans were roaming the countryside. And I was in the middle, afraid to move. One day that Good Angel, the peasant, came to warn me that I was…
Fathers and Brothers: A Memoir
The parting was not long in coming. My father died two months before I turned six.
To this day, I go to him at difficult times. Mostly to complain that he abandoned me. The handful of memories that he…
Dreaming of Junk Food
Leehee woke me up at a quarter of four in the afternoon and asked me to come with them to Ein Hod for the Seder, despite everything.
“Don’t do this to me,” I said. “You know I’m not…
The Cossacks
For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.
My mother, when she was dying…
A New Exegesis with God’s Help
I am now writing, with God’s help, a new commentary on your breasts.
It is a precious, blessed composition, in my poverty I have gathered various commentaries,
From what came to hand. It is a…