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.
A Story about a Name
Older people still remember it. Younger people know about it from reading our classic writers of the older generation: how Jews once gave much thought to naming a child, long before it was born and…
God Hid His Face
All roads led to death,
Every road.
All winds breathed betrayal,
Every wind.
In every doorway, vicious dogs barked,
In all the doorways.
All the waters laughed at us,
All the waters.
Every night grew…
A Kol Nidre Service at the Gȩsia Street Cemetery
I was then in Warsaw for the second time. That city had always exerted a powerful attraction for me, with its great and all-encompassing Jewish life. When I was in the Polish capital for the first…
Tales of Kleinville
Open a map, stretch out your index finger, run it along the winding contours of the Plata River, and you will come to a small black dot that does and does not seem like the…
The Old Notebook
The filthy train lurched along the tracks, jolting my spine through the slats of the wooden seat.
I was thoughtful, my happiness mixed with vague regrets. Happiness? No, a deserter’s sense of hard-won…
A Woman of Her Age
Once a week, even now, Mrs Goffman makes that chauffeur drive her slowly down from the mountain, back to St Lawrence Boulevard and Rachel Street [in Montreal]; she doesn’t want any old cronies who…
The Language of Faith: Selected Jewish Prayers
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…
Notes on the New Translation of the Torah
It has not always been easy to break with the more than two-thousand-year-old manner of translating the Hebrew Bible, the word-for-word manner. Thus in Gen. 14.1–2 (cf. vv…
The Kitchen
In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a “home…
The Tenth Man
The Cabalist:Sexton, light the candles. [The Sexton lights each man’s candle. The Cabalist advances slowly to The Girl, who stands slackly, her body making small occasional jerking movements…
My Last Two Thousand Years
I was present at the last birth. My wife and I had done the natural childbirth exercises. We were ready. The doctor was kind and easy.
The child was born, my fourth child, a boy. After three girls…
Letter to Abigail Franks
Flat Bush, Saturday, 10 o’c[lock]., August 10th, [17]’81
My dear Abby: [ . . . ]
[ . . . ] By the by, few N.York ladies know how to entertain company in their own houses unless they introduce the card…