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.
Promissory Note on Clay Tablet
Promissory note on clay tablet, Judahtown, Babylonia, 550 BCE. This promissory note, written in cuneiform script, has an endorsement by the debtor (named Shelemiah), written on the lower edge, in West…
City Plan Incised on Clay Tablet
City plan incised on clay tablet, Babylonia. The command in Ezekiel 4:1 to “incise Jerusalem” on a brick may have meant to incise a map of it, like this map of the Babylonian city Nippur (near where…
Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood
Mar Abramowitz did not attend services in our temple. With a dozen or so other Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe he worshiped in a tiny downtown loft that was said, by those who had never been…
A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile
Bread
Very early in the morning we went to pick up fresh bread at Doña Blanquita’s. However, before arriving at her house that resembled the generosity of her hands and clay ovens, we had to cross a…
The Complete Jewish Guide to Britain and Ireland
The vast majority of London’s Jews live in the northern suburbs. In the 1990s, the borough of Barnet in the northwest emerged as one of the largest Jewish areas. Redbridge, east of London, is the…
Community and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry
The Jewish community as a whole is a unique blend of kinship and consent. […] The fact that Jews are born Jewish places them in a special position to begin with, one that more often than not has…
Exiled from Exile: Existential Reflections
To be in exile, with a religious or historical sense that one is exiled, is to have already a mission and purpose in life. One’s clear project then is to end the exile and to return to…
From Beirut to Jerusalem
On the morning of June 1, 1984, I drove from Beirut to Jerusalem. The taxi came early and Mohammed and I said our goodbyes in my sandy parking lot overlooking the Mediterranean, while Eddy the…
History, Counterhistory, and Narrative
An offshoot of the Nazi counterhistory still lives forth in the various apologetic-polemical exercises known as “revisionist” literature. It is a name given (inter alia) to a distinct group of…