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.
The Present State of the Jews: On Circumcision
Circumcision has so peculiar a veneration among the present Jews, that if all other parts of their Religion were to be changed, this like Mount…
Netsaḥ Yisra’el (The Strength of Israel)
It has been clarified for you that the survival of Israel in their state of exile depends on their unity and their connection with each other, and their separation from the idolatrous nations. It is…
Your eyebrow, dear, is like a charm
Your eyebrow, dear, is like a charm
that draws to you life’s greatest joys.
Rounded like a bow, that brow,
or like a moon in half eclipse.
Your eye, beside it, is a pool,
all sparkle, like a…
Three Picture Poems
The turning wheel runs round and round.
It opens and closes the exit of my gate.
Noisily it turns for ruin and destruction.
My head is split, my entrails spilled.
It chases and it catches…
Europe
I have always backed off from the word.
In the Thirties Europe meant French. But was it only then? Not in earlier centuries? A bloody lesson learned that Europe was Balmazújváros as well as Notre…
Mother’s Day, Coney Island: Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Home
And veins web her temples,
and my father pins on the orchid,
and my card names her the best mother.
But Alzheimer’s or arteriosclerosis (the end is the same)
praises him ad nauseum,
but accuses my…
In a Nutshell
Credo in a kind of
American jewish Hamlet-like
bagel, too round for action
yet leavened enough by contact
with the near-dead past—you call it
landscape, I call it history—to provide
a layered vantage…
Judahite Pillar Figurine with Mold-made Head
Terra-cotta pillar figurines are found throughout the biblical territory of Judah and date to the eighth to seventh centuries BCE. Most were decorated with a white background layer and one or more…
Seal of Uriyahu Son of Azaryahu
This seal, found in En Gedi, is made of brown mottled dolerite and decorated with lines and dots that surround and separate the names.