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 Coveted City: Salonika
The city modernizes more and more. One hardly sees those baggy, dark, unsightly breeches of old, the ones that Muslims, Christians, and poor Jews still wore in the middle of the last century. Until…
Above Eternal Peace
Above Eternal Peace is Isaak Levitan’s most famous painting, a revered example of the “mood landscapes” popular in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. The artist painted the view from a cliff…
The Revolutionary Land of Russia
Dos revolutsyonere Rusland (Revolutionary Russia) was a Yiddish-language publication issued in 1905, during the Russian Revolution. Published in New York by the Jewish Socialist Federation, the…
A Salonikan Jewish Man Recalls the Day of His Wedding
When my engagement was decided, my sister and brother-in-law announced, “You are engaged” without my even meeting the father of the bride.
As the date of my wedding approached, I still didn’t have the…
Of Bygone Days (Shloyme Reb Khayims)
Mendele the bookpeddler says: Whenever a Jew comes to a journey’s end, he feels as if his hips are breaking, his back aching, and his knees shaking from being crushed and squeezed…
A History of the Jews of Turkey and the Orient
1.
In the year 5121 (1361 CE), Sultan Murad I conquered the great city of Adrianople—called Edirne by the Turks and Endirne by the Jews…
Our Political Tasks
Neglect of the Tasks of Autonomous Activity of the Proletariat: The Heritage of the Iskra Period
Many, far too many comrades remain deaf and blind to the questions we have just raised. This deafness…
Jewish Jokes, Parables, and Stories
Humor—is a Jewish thing. What Jew doesn’t enjoy listening to a nice story, parable, or witticism? When is a Jew indisposed to joking around? Not due to great luxury, God forbid, but on the contrary…
Exile
In Exile, a column of Jews makes their way across a barren landscape that evokes the desert that the biblical Israelites wandered for forty years. But the people here are clearly East European Jews…
Easter Picture
This fantastical picture by Florine Stettheimer melds together a biblical pastoral scene (palm trees, sheep, and women dressed in imagined Middle Eastern clothing) with a group of modern American…
Book for Learning Yiddish and English
A page from Libro de embezer las linguas Ingleza y Yudish (Book for Learning English and Yiddish), a guidebook for Ladino-speaking immigrants in Yiddish and English with Ladino transliteration and…
Discovering the World
There were other inimical forces, too, besides the police and the Enemy, more uncanny and less palpable forces. When I dragged behind the nursemaid who held my younger brother by the hand…