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.
Muslim Woman in Veil
In the 1930s, Lotte Errell and her husband, also a photographer, traveled the world, visiting countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The outbreak of war in 1939 found the now divorced and…
Kerch, Crimea (Grief)
When Dmitri Baltermants took this picture in January 1942, he and the other Soviet photographers who were accompanying liberating troops did not at first understand what they were seeing. Were these…
Coney Island
The ethos of the Photo League, the cooperative that Sid Grossman co-founded, was that documenting everyday life was a way not only of recording social progress but also contributing to it, by helping…
Sculpture of Ben-Gurion
By the time she created this statue of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the State of Israel, Chana Orloff had moved away from the cubist style she favored early in her career to a more…
L’Unité d’habitation à Nantes-Rezé
The Unité d'habitation of Nantes-Rezé is an apartment building located in Rezé, a suburb of Nantes, France designed by Le Corbusier. Lucien Hervé photographed the building, as he did many buildings…
Arriving Family, King George Street, Johannesburg
In this photograph, David Goldblatt captured a Black family newly arrived in Johannesburg, looking small and vulnerable as they pass the tall pole of a streetlamp, with massive buildings looming…
Codex Artaud VII
Codex Artaud VII is one of a series of thirty-four scrolls that Nancy Spero based on the writings of Antonin Artaud, a writer and theater director famous for conceptualizing the “Theatre of Cruelty.”…
Esther Scroll
The scroll (megillah) of Esther is read out loud on the holiday of Purim. This example, from Baghdad, is hand painted, with an ornate design in which bands of flowers frame the text. It is rolled on a…
Minute Book of Psalms Society Serving in the Russian Army
In 1827, Tsar Nicholas I issued a statute that effectively made Russian Jews liable to military service, as part of a policy that sought to transform the Jewish population into integrated subjects who…
People Pouring out of a Public Building into the Street
People Pouring out of a Public Building into the Street is one of Friedrich Friedländer’s best-known works. In the mid-nineteenth century, as part of a trend in European art that was moving away from…
We Must Decide!
After long deliberation, I concluded that we would be making a grave mistake if we did not participate in the upcoming kehilah electio…
Yiddish and Jewishness
The world is wicked. To us Jews—of course and of course. And if we are facing destruction, we must be ready, we must be armed against destruction. Fascism wants to exterminate us. It is a war on death…