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.
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…
Protest at the Funeral of Anti-Tsarist Revolutionaries
This postcard was printed by the Bund to commemorate the death of a worker, Kagan (Kohen), who was arrested in Mozir (today, Mazyr, Belarus) in the midst of one of the numerous protests against the…
Der pinkes (cover)
Der pinkes (The Book of Records, or The Annals) appropriated the term for the old-fashioned record book of a Jewish community or institution to name a very new phenomenon: the first “annual for the…
Hokey Pokey
Known for their slapstick sketches, the duo Weber and Fields (Joseph Weber, 1867–1942, and Lew Fields, b. Moses Schanfield, 1867–1942) performed musical shows that included singing, dancing, burlesque…
Ketubah Abstract
Nathan Marcus Adler is credited with this first English translation of the ketubah (bridal contract), which had been preserved in its traditional Aramaic version. In Adler's time, English-speaking…
Grininke beymelekh (cover)
Grininke beymelekh (Little Green Trees), no. 1 (Vilna: B. A. Kletzkin, 1914.) The title of this Yiddish children’s journal, the first of the genre to appear regularly, was drawn from the Yiddish poem…