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.
Perek be-shir (A Treatise on Poetry)
A compilation containing all the techniques of poetry simply put; covering all the principles, meters, rhymes, correct methods, and true rules; sifted and clarified; solid as a bronze mirror, such…
Beri‘ah ve-Zimrah (Briyo and Zimro)
Zimro, the son of Tovas [ . . . ] was very good-looking, highly intelligent, and a scholar. Now, the king loved him more than any other member of the royal household. He was the leading figure at…
Generation without Memory: A Jewish Journey in Christian America
There are contradictions and ambivalences in our celebrating Thanksgiving. We are recent Americans. It wasn’t the Mayflower that brought our people over here. We know too much about what the coming of…
Israeli Blues
“Secular is a terrible word”; “secular is a word I don’t like,” “there is no such thing as a secular Jew”—these clichés are common among absolutely secular intellectuals when they discuss problems of…
Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Music in Nineteenth-Century Reform Sources from Hamburg: Ancient Tradition in the Dawn of Modernity
Let us begin with the most basic questions: Can oral traditions of music constitute a reliable source for historical research? While this question is applicable to most music…
Hot Tea and Sponge Cake at 10:00 P.M.
My mother and father were an embarrassment to me, up until high school. They were much older than my friends’ parents (my dad was forty-seven and my mother was forty-four when I was born), and they…
Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective
The Central Conference of American Rabbis has on special occasions described the spiritual state of Reform Judaism. The centenaries of the founding of the Union of American Hebrew…
Lamentations
Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princess among states
Is become a thrall.
Bitterly she weeps in the night…
Adonay, Our People Have Called You
Adonay,
Our people have called You Monarch of the universe.
Help us who live without a monarch on a throne
To perceive Your sovereignty
In the royal splendor that pervades the universe,
In the holy…
Reform Synagogue, Plauen
This modern synagogue in Plauen (in the Saxony region) was one of the few synagogues built in Germany in the economically turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. Jews and non-Jews contributed funds…
Untitled, New Yorker, February 3, 1945
By 1945, when this cartoon was published in The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg had already established the unconventional style of cartooning for which he became famous. His cartoons expressed humor…
The Strabismic Jew
The Strabismic Jew is one of Baskin's most famous prints. “Strabismic” means “squinting” and, indeed, the Yiddish inscription reads “The Jew with the squinty eyes.” In this enigmatic woodcut, the face…