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.
To My Tunisian Friends
I have just spent a few days in Tunis.
My pleasure increases each time I return to that city and its inhabitants and experience the liveliness of the Avenue Jules-Ferry, and above all, the free and…
The Faith Healer
I got up and stepped out of the hotel. The early-morning breeze was moist and cool—pure refreshment after a night of suffering.
Everything seemed reborn, and the small-town, good-natured Cubans…
A War Has No “Good End”
In 1943, the nights were black. The country was at war with Germany and a blackout was instituted, perforated from time to time by fifth-columnists lighting cigarettes to reveal Bom Fim’s defensive…
Isbilia
I’m seeking you, Isbilia, my sultana, on the cloudy circle of water where I spread my glance to pierce your reflection, somewhere, between the foam and the wave, on the crest of imperceptible…
The Future of the American Jew
If we Jews had our patron saints, the priest-prophet Ezekiel would be the patron saint of those of us who are vitally concerned in the outcome of the present crisis in…
Responsum on Orthodox Judaism in America
Question:In America there is now a notable general rise in religion. The membership of religious organizations has grown, religious gatherings attract a larger audience, etc. Likewise in Jewish life…
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
[ . . . ] Without Jewish help in administrative and police work—the final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police—there would have been either complete…
The French Enlightenment and the Jews
The era of Western history that began with the French Revolution ended in Auschwitz. The emancipation of the Jews was reversed in the most horrendous way. For a short while after 1945 the reigning…
Poland: Memoirs and Scenes
Nighttime at the home of I. L. Peretz, and Shimon (aka Bernard) Kratko appears like a vision. Who masterminded an audience with Peretz, I can’t tell you, but it was all that mattered now, as if…
Gentleman’s Agreement
Every article you’ve done for us, Phil,” Minify had said, “has a kind of human stuff in it. The right answers get in it somehow.”
Sure. But he hadn’t asked for them and pried for them. When he’d…
The Last Mohican
Behind him, a short distance to the right, he had noticed a stranger—give a skeleton a couple of pounds—loitering near a bronze statue on a stone pedestal of the heavy-dugged Etruscan wolf suckling…
New York: February 1965
On a day transparent with light
like a landscape by Monet,
my childhood broke away
from a small Jewish town
and glided on ice
blue in the distance—
while a small cloud hovered in me
like a cloud of a…