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.
Portraits of the Franks-Levy Family
In the 1730s, the German Jewish Franks-Levy family commissioned an artist to create portraits of three generations of the family. These paintings are all attributed to Gerardus Duykinck, a member of a…
Illustration from Kehunat Avraham (The Priesthood of Abraham)
Kehunat Avraham (The Priesthood of Abraham), completed in Venice in 1719, is an interpretation and retelling of sections from the book of Psalms in verse. The Hebrew text in this illustration comes…
‘Evronot Manuscript (Rules for Calculation of the Calendar)
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
Drawing of the Lebanon War
The Lebanon War of 1982 began on 6 June, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon after repeated attacks and counter-attacks from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon…
Sefer ha-zikhronot (The Book of Remembrances)
[ . . . ] And all the more so with our brethren the people of Israel who come from the lands of the dispersion, who do not know and have not seen the way in which every person called by the name of…
Colophon: Tefilah le-Moshe (Prayer of Moses)
All the letters in this beautiful new prayer book,
from beginning to end, I set with my own hands.
Gele, daughter of R. Moses the printer
and Frau Freide, who bore me among ten children, may they…
Sefer meyrav (Book of Abundance)
Now the daughter of the King of the Kittim, on hearing this, became highly enraged, and she said, “Is there any room to defend the cause of these people who were lacking in wisdom and set down a…
On the Glory of the Eggplant
Various eggplant recipes have been passed down to us.
the first is one inherited from the late Morena:
you cut it into slices and throw them into the main dish
for that is how she was taught her by…
Fringe or Tassel
This fringe from Kuntillet Ajrud, knotted from undyed linen threads, could be the fringe (tzitzit) that Israelites are commanded to wear on the corners of their garments, as indicated in Numbers 15:37…
Commandments and Concerns: Jewish Religious Education in Secular Society
This book deals with the problem of religion in contemporary Jewish education. It grew out of my thinking and teaching about Jewish education, which made me realize that religion is always on the…
Anti-Semitism on the Left
Like many of their Jewish assimilationist parents, many Jews who became active in the Left felt that the best way to deal with anti-Semitism was to convince themselves that if they showed they were…
Talking to Little Children about God
The main point is that, since we are all irremediably inadequate to know the essence of God’s nature, all names (attempts to capture the Divine essence) are metaphors.
We can encourage children to “do…