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.
Hybrid Creatures with Six Wings
Hybrid creatures with six wings, Syria, 10th or 9th century BCE. Numerous hybrid creatures, often winged, that combined features of various animals, are known from ancient art. Another example is the…
Lecture with Celan
How many know
the number of creatures is endless?
So many know,
only a gasp in their questions is possible.
All that fullness—
of wounds that won’t scar over.
pain’s grillework
persisting in…
Chariots Trampling Enemies and Burning City in Assyrian Relief
Chariots trampling enemies and burning city in drawing of late 8th century BCE Assyrian relief in Sargon’s palace in Khorsabad, Iraq. One of Sargon’s horse-drawn chariots, its driver holding a whip…
Song for Hannah Arendt
Out of being torn apart
comes art.
Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!
Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)
Out of the essential…
Bronze Bowl with Musicians
Bronze bowl with musicians, Cyprus, late 9th or early 8th century BCE. The engraved scene shows musicians and dancers. In this bronze bowl, five inches in diameter, three female musicians are playing…
Departures
I wasn’t a very political adolescent. I had grown up surrounded by unexplained cautions, by ellipses, and all these silences had sealed off the public world, so that I didn’t really believe in it…
On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language
[…] [I]f suddenly Mexico and Israel went to war, on which side would I fight? My cowardly answer was plain and simple: “I really wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. So on neither one, since I’m a pacifist…
The Devil in Vienna
[…]Uncle Herbert was right, part of the time they made them use toothbrushes, for a joke. They sloshed bucketfuls of ammonia and other stuff that burns the skin and stings the eyes over the street and…
A Man from Lachish with His Sons
This detail appears in a relief from the palace of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (r. 705–681 BCE), in Nineveh depicting the Assyrian conquest of Lachish in 701 BCE. (For the full relief, see "Conquest…
The Ramparts Walk
Next on our list of “things-to-do-today” was the Ramparts Walk to enable people to walk atop almost the entire circumference of the wall, excepting the area of the Temple Mount and the mosques. This…