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.
Encounter
Morning flew by in the usual way,
Up and down streets, it raced,
Unwinding the spring of an ongoing watch
That the night would wind up again.
A coat was fastened over the chest
With a clasp and a…
Satan in Goray
It was Rabbi Benish’s practice to say his afternoon and evening prayers by himself in his study. When the news reached his ears he hurried to the prayer house. But it…
Cinnamon Shops
At the time of the shortest, sleepy winter days, edged on both sides with the furry dusk of mornings and evenings, when the city reached out ever deeper into the labyrinth of winter nights, and was…
Yiddish Literary Café
The puritanically strict observance of the closing hour in London, the lack of continental-style coffee-houses, and perhaps also the isolated situation of the by no means untroubled British Isles may…
Power/Jew Süss
[ . . . ] After the intractable insolence shown by Süss when his sentence was pronounced, he was fettered cross-wise in the Chamber of Nobles, where he was to be confined until execution, and kept…
Tristia
I have studied the science of leaving
in night’s unbraided sorrows.
Oxen ruminate—the waiting lingers to the final
hour of the city’s vigil—and I honor rituals
from that other night—the rooster…
The Sins of My Youth
There are two sorts of biography: the biography a famous person writes for his admirers, because the public likes to know everything about celebrities, and [the] autobiography, usually written because…
Esther Play for Purim
Purim plays (Purim shpiln, in Yiddish), sometimes also called Esther plays, have been known since the fifteenth century in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities. These folk plays were performed on…