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.
Jewish Betrothal Ceremony
This illustration depicting a Jewish betrothal ceremony appeared in the book Jüdisches Ceremoniel (Jewish Ceremonial Customs), by Paul Christian Kirchner, a Jewish convert to Christianity. The first…
Haggadah
In 1583, Mattetiah ben David Spagnolo completed this illuminated Haggadah for Leon ben Judah Bili. Greek (Romaniote/Byzantine) Jews had lived on the island of Crete since the Second Temple period…
Title Page of Moses Cordovero’s Tefilah le-Moshe (Prayer of Moses)
Moses Cordovero was a revered scholar and teacher in the kabbalistic center of Safed, which stressed the importance of mystical prayer and kavanah (mystical intention). Tefilah le-Moshe contains kavan…
A Woman Drawing Water from a Well
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
She Said to Him, “You Be the Driver and I’ll Be the Madam,” Then They Picked Up the Fender and Posed, Hillbrow, 1975
Photographer David Goldblatt dedicated much of his work to documenting racial injustice in South Africa. The title of the photograph tells its story. Two Black South Africans use a car fender to role…
D-C
In the late 1970s, after a period in which he painted only in black and white, Held began using bright colors in his paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, enabling him to explore space, volume…
Drawing for the Film “Felix in Exile”
Kentridge’s signature practice is to draw an image in charcoal, photograph it, and then repeatedly erase, redraw, rephotograph it, and then animate it on film. Felix in Exile is the fifth film in…
Fanning the Fear
Fanning the Fear is a large floor map of the United States, with the place names labeled in Arabic. The installation is one of many artworks by Neustein in which he explores and maps the relationships…
Emek ha-bakhah (Valley of Tears)
Granada was under control of the Ishmaelites for seven hundred years, until Ferdinand and Isabel, the monarchs of Spain, besieged it, for many days, and captured the whole region of that kingdom in…
Poem on the Pestilence of 1713
In the year 5473 [1713] since the creation of, the world, from the moment it began the plague fell upon us because of our many sins. In the community we still had no one ill nor bad air in the country…
Tratado de los sueños (Treatise on Dreams)
Illustrious sir, having frequently thought about and recalled many treatises which in the presence of Your Worship were practiced during the time when I enjoyed your divine…
Takkanot (Regulations)
These ordinances have been decreed by us on Thursday, the twenty-first of Tammuz, corresponding to the twenty-first of June, of the year 5314 (1554) here at Ferrara.
- Printers shall not be permitted to…