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.
Karaite Ketubah (Crimea)
While ketubot (marriage contracts) are usually written in Aramaic, Karaite ketubot are written in Hebrew. They are often pentagonal in shape, most often with a pointed bottom. This example has a…
High Synagogue (Krakow)
The High (Wysoka) Synagogue was built in a Renaissance style in the mid-sixteenth century in the Kazimierz district of Kraków. It is the third-oldest synagogue in Kraków. This synagogue owes its name…
Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam
In 1670, Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community commissioned a new synagogue, which, when finished, was the largest in the world. The master mason Elias Bouman (ca. 1636–1686), a non-Jew, who had…
Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories)
The Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories), a collection of more than two hundred and fifty stories in Yiddish, was popular among Jews in Western and Eastern Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth…
Fireflies in the Dark: The Story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Children of Terezin
At the end of the workday, the children were allowed to visit their parents and relatives for one hour. Sometimes there were longer visits on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. But there were no visits…
The Dead Class
In The Dead Class, the most famous of Kantor’s theater pieces from the 1970s, the main characters of the play are elderly men (who are to be understood as being dead), who return to their school desks…
Hitler Dream
Many of Borofsky’s works are based on autobiographical narratives or his dreams about people such as movie stars, his family, other artists, and historical figures, including Hitler. The text in this…
Untitled
In 1981, Anastasi (who is not Jewish) began working on a series of works featuring the word “Jew,” because of its “charged” positive and negative valences. Untitled (jew) is composed of four canvases…
Cell No. 1
The “Cellules,” or Cells, were six tiny all-white living spaces that Absalon planned to install in Tokyo, Paris, Zurich, New York, Tel Aviv, and Frankfurt. He intended to live in them, so they were…
A Postcolonial Kinderhood
Reichek used needlework to comment on and subvert the embroidered sampler, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century woman’s craft, transforming it into a feminist exploration of the exposure and…
Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect)
[1] After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing…
Ma’amarim bi-refu’ah (Chapters on Healing)
For do not interpretations belong to God? There are many kinds of dreams in the world: dreams that are mostly true and close to prophecy, but the sages said that there are no dreams without idle…