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 Travelers
In The Travelers, one of a series of “Mother Paintings,” Marie-Louise Motesiczky depicts herself and her mother, Henrietta (the white-haired woman at right), escaping from Nazi-occupied Austria…
Memories of a Peaceful Time
Emmanuel Evzerichin was one of several Soviet Jewish photographers who documented the battle of Stalingrad. Many of his photographs were unusual in that they focused not on combat, but on the effects…
Untitled, Execution: Babi Yar series. Nizhny Tagil or Leningrad
Felix Lembersky’s three Babi Yar paintings were among the first artistic representations of the Nazi massacre in Kyiv, when, over the course of two days in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were…
Membres de la communauté juive d’Ifrane
This photograph by Zédé Shulmann is one of the last taken of the Jewish community of Ifrane (also known as Oufrane), Morocco, whose last members immigrated to Israel in the 1950s. According to legend…
Alphabet of Creation
This calligraphic print appears in Ben Shahn’s book Alphabet of Creation, based on a tale about how God created the world through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet taken from the Zohar, a thirteenth…
Israeli Beatniks, Night Club
In this photograph of Israeli beatniks in a night club, Paul Schutzer captured a different side of Israeli life from that usually portrayed in the Israeli and international media. His partying…
Farb Family Portrait
In the 1960s, Audrey Flack began to paint photorealistic pictures with social and political themes, reproducing photographs of people from all walks of life, as well as everyday objects. Farb Family…
The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin)
R. B. Kitaj considered himself a figurative artist at a time when abstract art was the dominant trend. His paintings, with their brightly colored and sometimes overlapping figures, produce a collage…
Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism
1. We have now obtained a preliminary articulation of reason and religion; we turn now to the sources of Judaism, out of which the religion of reason should be derived. We ought…
European Judaism
Christianity and the cult of Mithras were once in a competition which made the outcome a fifty-fifty chance. Both appealed equally to the Roman soldier who had to fight the endless wars of the Roman…
Photography
Photographs shock us in so far as they show us something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with…
The Religious Philosophy of the Jews
Note: The word “religion” is not biblical. It is taken over from paganism, where it does not include the factor of freedom. People disagree as to whether it is derived from religere or relegere; about…