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…
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…
To My Friends
God’s grace has surely been overabundant.
Riches were mine. Hardly a day would pass
When human sympathy did not alight on me
Like manna from the sky.
I cupped my slender fingers to receive it
Ironic…
The Jewish Object: A Shopper’s Report
In the new religious revival, the theologians and philosophers have it easy; they can battle about the nature of revelation endlessly in the pages of Commentary. Parents and householders, on the other…
Ancestral Tales and Legends
Under the roof of the oldest synagogue in Prague (the Altneuschul), because of the belief that misfortune would meet the workers, there is preserved, in its primeval form and color, a piece of trunk…
Shem ha-gedolim ha-shalem (Names of the Great Ones, Complete)
Although he himself would not recite “for the sake of the unification,” in keeping with the ruling of the Gaon—the Noda bi-Yehudah [R. Ezekiel Landau]—he was occasionally jealous of those who say it.…