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.
Kabbalistic Diagram
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…
Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
This edition of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was printed in Sabbioneta, Italy by Cornelio Adelkind for Tobias Foà. The twelfth-century work was an attempt to reconcile Aristotelianism with…
Text of an Excommunication
This text of an excommunication, found in David Aboab’s manuscript of Sefer emet ve-yatsiv (True and Certain), chronicles a conflict in the Sephardic congregation of Curaçao. The first Jews arrived in…
Druksland
Druks was commissioned to create this self-portrait in the form of a topographical map, by Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co., a large European printing house, who used it as a promotional gift for their…
Moon
Late in his career, Guston turned from abstract expressionism to figurative art, creating iconoclastic, allegorical paintings. Moon is a combination of still-life, self-portrait, and landscape. In the…
Assembly Hall, Butyrka Prison
For three years, Lamm was imprisoned in the Gulag (the Soviet system of labor camps) for applying for an exit visa, and he documented this experience in drawings and paintings. The red banner on the…
Courtyard of Sarajevo Synagogue
This photograph of a courtyard of the Sarajevo Synagogue is included in Serotta’s 1991 book, Out of the Shadows: A Photographic Portrait of Jewish Life in Central Europe, which collected photographs…
The Empty Chair
The empty chair was a recurrent image in the work of Israeli artists. Because of its associations with the (fallen) throne of the biblical King David, it was sometimes used to represent a fallen…
Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin
Passages is a memorial in Portbou, Spain, created by Karavan to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou…
Wall Drawing #926
LeWitt is best known for his more than 1,300 wall drawings. He believed that artists did not need physically to create an artwork but only to provide the idea for it. With that in mind, he wrote…
Garden of Stones, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, New York
Garden of Stones, a garden of trees growing from stone, was planted in 2003 by Goldsworthy, Holocaust survivors, and their families at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on a second-story rooftop. The…
Crónica de los reyes otomanos (Chronicle of the Ottoman Kings)
The houses and rooms of the inhabitants of this most famous city are one or the other of two extremes: the good ones are sumptuous houses at the height of perfection and…