Hero Image

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.
Tooltip info icon

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…