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.
Yemeni Marriage Necklace
Jewish brides in Sana‘ (Yemen) traditionally wore a large necklace composed of dugag, large silver filigree beads, as part of their wedding ensemble. The dugag are hollow spheres that ring against…
Leshone-toyve shifskarte (Jewish New Year's Card in the Form of an Ocean Liner Ticket)
This card for Rosh Hashanah plays on the common Jewish experience of immigration to the United States to offer the traditional New Year’s wishes of long life, health, happiness, and success. Framing…
Cover Illustrations for Peretz's Dramen
The three art nouveau-influenced covers by Ber Kratko for three of Y. L. Peretz’s plays feature somewhat grotesque figures. The one for Vos in fidele shtekt (What Sticks in the Fiddle) features a…
Temerl
Page from Moyshe Broderzon’s Temerl, illustrated by Joseph Chaikov, and published in Moscow shortly before the Russian Revolution. Chaikov illustrated this children’s book in a neo-Romantic style. A…
Magen Avraham (Shield of Abraham)
When a borrower is asked to pay usury or interest, they frequently use this…
Dedicated to Lincoln’s Birthday
Cover of Der groyser kundes: A zhurnal far humor, vitz un satire (Feb. 9, 1912), with a cartoon by Isidore Busatt. The cartoon depicts Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, looking on as “Modern…
Benefit Lunch with Bertha Kalich
This full-page advertisement for a benefit lunch, to be held that day, December 14, 1898, at the Thalia Theater in New York City, with the famed Yiddish actress Bertha Kalich (ca. 1872–1939), includes…
Irving Music Hall
This bilingual Yiddish-English cover of a program for a variety show at Irving Music Hall on New York City’s Lower East Side advertises “high class Jewish vaudeville” and bills itself as “the finest…
Dance Study
“Tanzstudie,” from Hans Brandenburg’s Der moderne Tanz. This "dance study" was based on an abstract, modernist dance performed by Alexander Sacharoff (1886–1963), whose distinctive expression and…
Song without Words
Song without Words, painted in Jaffa ca. 1911–1913. Like many of Jan’s works, this painting is suffused with poetic and atmospheric symbolism. Here, a beautiful young woman with haunted eyes holds a…
Thieves
This scene is from the 1917 Vilna Troupe production of Fishl Bimko’s Ganovim (Robbers), featuring, from left to right, Morris Tarlov, Avrom Teytlboym, Herts Grosbard, Luba Kadison, and Noyekh Nakhbush…