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.
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…
Memoirs of a Jewish Colonist
I. Of Pimps, Prostitutes, and Other SeducersWe saw some ten richly-dressed women, accompanied by fat-bellied men in top hats, standing at the green metal gate of the immigrants’ hotel. Through the…
Wailing Wall
In these days when Jews are being killed in Palestine, I chose to go to Grenadierstrasse—not to Jerusalem. I had the feeling it was better to be with the bereaved than the dead. I paid a condolence…
A Peculiar Treasure
On Saturdays, and on unusually busy days when my father could not take the time to come home to the noon dinner, it became my duty to take his midday meal down to him, very carefully packed in a large…
The Role of Linguistic Folklore in Yiddish Literature
Linguistic folklore in literature is a component of realistic style. At first, new or renewed literature is usually realistic. The same reasons that introduce…
The World Convention of YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) upon the Tenth Anniversary of Its Founding,
Professor Fishl Shneerson (Warsaw): Out of great respect for YIVO…