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.
An Overview: Torah—Written and Oral
When a human being builds a palace, he does not build it according to his own wisdom, but according to the wisdom of a craftsman. And the craftsman does not build according to his own wisdom, rather…
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…
Figures in the Nisko Camp, Poland
As a prisoner in the Nisko labor camp in Poland in 1939 and 1940, Leo Haas painted portraits of SS men in exchange for extra food rations and art supplies. He also documented the daily lives of…
Self-Portrait in Graham Hollywood Car
In 1940, Man Ray fled France to escape the Nazi occupation and temporarily settled in Los Angeles. There he established a studio and made a living by his photography (in Paris, he had worked as a…
Design for the Memory
Abraham Rattner painted Design for the Memory in 1943 when the murder of Jews by the Nazis was underway in Europe. He chose Christian iconography, namely, the crucifixion of Jesus, to express his…
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…
Homesickness
In the 1940s and 1950s, Endre Bálint’s paintings began to feature mythological and fantastical symbols and figures, in a style sometimes reminiscent of Hungarian folk art and archaic art. In…
B’nai Or Prayer Shawl
The idea for a multicolored prayer shawl (tallit) came to Zalman Schachter-Shalomi when he was meditating on a midrash about God creating the world while wrapped in a robe of light. Schachter-Shalomi…
The Artist behind Bars (Self-Portrait)
Boris Penson painted this self-portrait soon after he was refused a visa to emigrate to Israel. He depicted himself in prison stripes against a background of a grate against a dreary landscape. After…
Portrait of Wakara
Solomon Nunes Carvalho painted this portrait of Wakara (ca. 1808–1855) of the Timpanogos tribe (later chief of the Utah Indians) after returning from a trip to the territories of Kansas, Colorado, and…
Heinrich Heine
[ . . . ] The Judaism into which Heine was born and with which he had to come to terms as a maturing man was the Judaism of the German reform. This was, to be sure, no longer the reform, creative in…