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.
On the Other Side of the Poem
On the other side of the poem there is an orchard,
and in the orchard, a house with a roof of straw,
and three pine trees,
three watchmen who never speak, standing guard.
On the other side of the…
Great Jewish Short Stories
Most of the stories in this collection are modern; a few are ancient. They were written in Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Russian and English, yet all are, to a discerning eye, very clearly Jewish. [ . . .…
The Jewish Object: A Shopper’s Report
In the new religious revival, the theologians and philosophers have it easy; they can battle about the nature of revelation endlessly in the pages of Commentary. Parents and householders, on the other…
Notes from the American Revolution
I felt a common cause with these good men and women who had been moved to mid-wife freedom in the south, but the gulf that separated us is also wide. Their spirit of confession…
Amos vs. Amaziah
What made Amos vs. Amaziah weigh so heavily in the annals of history? I can only attempt a hint or an inkling of an answer.
I do so best by returning to the vision of Amos, as he…
How to Bring Mashiah
1. “If you’re planting a tree and you hear Mashiah has come, first finish planting and then run to the city gates to tell him Shalom” (Yochanan Ben Zakkai).
Therefore: Plant a tree somewhere as a…
Herself
Apples. That’s what New Yorkers of the 1930s remember. Apples of the Hesperides, neatly stalled on corner after corner, sold on the last trembling line of decency by men who were unwilling to beg…
Elegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers
I weep for you with all the letters of the alphabet
that made your hopeful songs. I saw how reason spent
itself in vain for hope, how you strove against regret—
and all the while your hearts were…
Last Will and Testament
Realizing that life is not in the hands of man but is governed by the only living God Almighty in whom I believe and adore, whose Divine Mosaic Law I, His slave, follow and venerate with all my heart…
The Childhood and Youth of a Man of the Enlightenment
I was born on 19 February 1758 in Nový Bydžov [in Bohemia] of well-to-do parents who destined me at birth to be a rabbi, a common practice among the Israelites then. For at that time, when all…
Ancestral Tales and Legends
Under the roof of the oldest synagogue in Prague (the Altneuschul), because of the belief that misfortune would meet the workers, there is preserved, in its primeval form and color, a piece of trunk…
The Tithe
[ . . . ] The sofer’s work is poorly compensated. There is an old proverb about how the soferim never grow wealthy in the land of Israel. I don’t know who gave birth to that pearl detached from the…