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.
Spirit of the Sea, Library Square Park, City of Bath, Maine
William Zorach created Spirit of the Sea at the request of the City of Bath, which wanted a fountain for a city park. The sculpture is similar to others in his oeuvre in that it consists of a figure…
Gigantomachy I
Gigantomachy I belongs to a series of paintings Leon Golub made in the 1960s and early 1970s named for a mythological battle between Olympian gods and a race of giants. The monumentally large mural…
Illustration to Sholem Aleichem, “The Haunted Tailor”
Sholem Aleichem’s grotesque story “The Haunted Tailor” tells of a poor, witless tailor who is sent on a mission to buy a milk-giving goat, who turns out to be possessed. In the Soviet Union, it was…
Exhibition Announcement, Jack Glenn Gallery, Artforum, October 1970
This ad for an exhibition at California State University Fullerton was intended as a manifesto. The artist Judy Gerowitz announced that she was divesting herself of “all names imposed upon her through…
Circumcision Bench
In Ashkenazic communities, circumcision benches with two seats were sometimes used from the nineteenth century on, one for the sandek, the godfather on whose lap the baby boy is circumcised, and one…
Ewer and Basin
This ewer and basin from Turkey were used to wash hands ritually during the Passover seder. Owned by the Benguiat family, a large and prominent Sephardic family in the Ottoman Empire, the objects…
Paper Cut—Brit Milah
Paper cuts have been a tradition of Jewish folk art, with the earliest record of one dating to the fourteenth century. Given the widespread availability of paper in Europe by the mid-nineteenth…
Interior of the Beth Elohim Synagogue Charleston, South Carolina (Solomon Nunes Carvalho)
The only image of the interior of the first synagogue of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, a congregation established in Charleston in 1749, is this picture, painted from memory by Solomon Nunes Carvalho. The…
Portrait of Leo Lehmann
Leo Lehmann (1782–1859) was the father of the popular portrait artist Rudolf Lehmann. Here he depicts his father, a painter and printmaker (and his son’s first art teacher) at work, with the tools of…
The Death of Tasso
One of Friedrich Friedländer’s best-known paintings, The Death of Tasso, depicts the death of the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595). Tasso was famous for his epic poem, La Gerusalemme liberate (…
A Sephardi Émigré Encourages Levantine Jews to Move to Mexico
It is a great pleasure for me to have this occasion, offered to me by the serial La Luz, to inform readers of the current situation in the Republic of Mexico, and to mention some of the reasons why…
We Speak and Write This Language against Our Will
Dear Vara of my soul,
Wherever it may be, I am always hit in the face by a pet peeve, some vexation and angst, due to the misbehavior of certain of our women who still do not know whether they are in…