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.
Esther Scroll
The book of Esther (also known as the Scroll [megillah] of Esther) is read out loud on the holiday of Purim. This example of a scroll from Venice has Hebrew text framed by arcades and borders…
Flörsheim Haggadah
This Haggadah, decorated in the Ashkenazic tradition, was copied in northern Italy. As is traditional for Ashkenazic Haggadahs, illustrations appear in the margins and frame the text. At the top left…
Book of Prayers for the Gravediggers Society
This illustration from a book of prayers for the Jewish Gravediggers Society depicts the cycle of life. Figures of men and women in pairs ascend and descend the staircase, progressing from youth to…
Talmud
The twelve-volume “Bermann Talmud'' was financed by the Court Jew Behrend Lehmann (Issachar Bermann Segal), printed in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, by Michael Gottschalk, and published by John…
Jewish Doctor (Medico Giudeo)
This depiction of a Jewish doctor is from a travelogue by French geographer Nicolas Nicolay, who is believed to have also created the illustrations in the book. Considered at the time a key source of…
Haggadah from Mantua, 1560
This Haggadah from Mantua, published by the Christian printer Giacomo Rufinelli under the supervision of Isaac ben Solomon Bassan, relies heavily on the Prague Haggadah of 1526, with the addition of…
Hanukkah Lamp
A prayer (Ha-nerot halalu anu madlikin (“These lights we burn”), usually recited after the blessings for lighting the Hanukkah candles, is inscribed on the back panel of this Hanukkah lamp from…
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
Nature Abhors a Vacuum is a monumental painting, over nine feet square. Though the artist, Frankenthaler, eschewed representational painting, she often cited landscapes as an inspiration for her work…
Plaza in the Snow
Beginning in 1958, Orkin took photographs from the window of her fifteenth-floor apartment overlooking New York City’s Central Park. She wrote that she spent a lot of time waiting “for the clouds to…
Altamira Elegy
Motherwell’s most famous series of artworks was his Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which he intended as “a funeral song” for the losing side, the Republicans, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)…
Untitled (My Mother Posing for Me)
My Mother Posing for Me is one of a series of photographs that Sultan made of his parents, Irving and Jean, from 1983 to 1992. They were published in his book, Pictures from Home, which explored the…
Jewish Boys
Segalove mines her own life for personal narratives as a source for her feminist, conceptual, video, and performance art. Jewish Boys, a photograph of text, tells an anecdote about her first day in a…