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.
Snuff Box
This rare example of an eighteenth-century American snuff box made of gold may have been made by its goldsmith Myer Myers in honor of the opening of a new Masonic lodge in New York. The cover of the…
History of the Jews (Hebrew Edition)
I am a Jew, and the Hebrew language is sweeter to me than the language of any other nation, for it is the heritage of our ancestors from time immemorial, a beloved remnant from days of yore…
Heder
Jacques Brandon set his painting of a heder, a traditional Jewish elementary school for boys, in a Mediterranean or Near Eastern location or in an imagined distant past. The boys are dressed in white…
What Is the Teaching of Kabbalah and Hasidism If Not Expansion?
What is the teaching of kabbalah and Hasidism if not expansion (Torat ha-harḥavah)? The tangible world should expand, the given worlds should increase, and this Torah that is written and passed down…
Lunacharsky and Hebrew
During the summer of 5679 [1919] the government suddenly stopped supporting Tarbut and its schools, and after regaining our composure, we decided to address [Anatoly] Lunacharsky regarding this…
A Doctor’s Lectures
The Ḥaydakim [Bacteria] and Their Characteristics[ . . . ] There are grounds for thinking that, apart from the absence of alcoholism, there are also race factors among Jews that play a certain role…
Testimony at the Eichmann Trial
Presiding Judge: I declare the sixty-eighth Session of the trial open.Decision No. 72We confirm the request of the Attorney General and will permit the…
Nine Suitcases
These nocturnal passenger trains in wartime have their own peculiar sounds. The deportation wagons have a way of screeching, like an eagle or a vulture—whereas this kind of train whines and groans as…
In the Grip of Cross-Currents
Now that the cup of poison is broken, there is no way out but to drink the cup of sorrows. . . .
My affirmation of life demanded that I should dedicate all the powers…
Givat ha-moreh [Commentary to Maimonides’ Moreh nevukhim, Guide for the Perplexed]
The telos (takhlit) of man’s activities, in the aspect (behinah) of having will and choice, is the ultimate human good (ha’hatslahah ha’enoshi’it). This excellence necessarily comes after the…
The Rigors of Jewish Historiography
The historiography of no people is so beset with the pretentious and condemnatory views of dilettantes as is that of the Israelites, which everyone fancies to know from the relevant sources. Thus, no…
Purim Charity Plate
This Purim charity plate was made in Dordrecht in the Netherlands between 1590 and 1611. It was used by Jews living in The Hague.