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.
Day of Atonement: Standing
My Lord, how stands it with me now
Who, standing here before you
(who, fierce as you are, are also just).
Cannot bow down. You order this.
Why, therefore, I must break
If bend I will not, yet bend I…
Israel: The Ever-Dying People
Is Israel alone a dying nation? Numerous civilizations have disappeared before there emerged the one in which we live so happily and unhappily at the same time. Each dying civilization was confident…
Jew and Gentile in the New South
There is very little real anti-Semitism in the South. There is even a solid tradition of philo-Semitism, the explanation of which lies in the very character of Southern Protestantism itself—in the…
The Feminine Mystique
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered…
The New York Intellectuals
We were living directly after the Holocaust of the European Jews. We might scorn our origins; we might crush America with discoveries of ardor; we might change our names. But we knew that but for an…
Red Ribbon on a White Horse
The sunset lit up the sky, splashing the drab tenements with gold, bringing memories of Sabbath candles and the smell of gefüllte fish. When I had lived on Hester Street, I would…
Shylock and His Daughter
Shylock:You speak of revenge, you who cage us within ghettos, you who cast us alive into flames, only because we are Jews. [Pause.] Are not Jews and Christians alike fashioned in the image of God…
The Golden Garden
[The lessons a mother should give her son]: My son, you should know that before your body looked the way it does now, it was nothing. You were formed in my belly from the drops of fertility that came…
Autobiography
When the Seven Years War broke out in 1756, I was the father of four children, and the cost of living was high. I had tried to make my way in the world like an honourable man. When the enemy Prussians…
Letter on His Conversion
A few days after receiving your precious letter of 5 November 1854, I began collating [the pages of my book], which took me until New Year’s eve to finish. But what a chasm in between! I began the…
Travel Journal
The River Jordan runs through the valley and empties into Great Salt Lake. The city is thirty miles from the Lake, and the valley is entirely surrounded with high mountains topped with snow, winter…
The Death of the Tavern Keeper’s Wife
With every stone that was set in the new barn, another drop of life seemed to ebb from the wife of the randar or tavern keeper. When she looked out at the building, she often said that she would not…