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.
Ghetto and Emancipation
The history of the Jews in the last century and a half has turned about one central fact: that of Emancipation. But what has Emancipation really meant to the Jew? The generally accepted view has it…
In Praise of the Hebraists in America
Like a sparse string of lights, scattered but connected
belonging to a strange and darkly snowy train station
that suddenly pops up among the winter fields,
forgotten somewhere between New York and…
A Cityful of Jews
The man was a ferment of intelligence and emotion. He could not grow accustomed to the conventional life of the common herd. He thought differently from all the others and disliked collective thinking…
The Song of the Dying: To the History of Jewish Creativity under the Nazi Occupation
Among the illegal publications that appeared in Poland during the Nazi occupation, one can find a small anthology of poems entitled Z otchlani, from the Abyss. This modest volume, published by the…
Warsaw Courtyards
This was not a very big courtyard, a longish but narrow one, like hundreds of others of this type in the thickly settled part of Jewish Warsaw. One side, the innermost one, was a two-story…
Peace of Mind
Once, as a young man, I undertook to draw up a catalogue of the acknowledged goods of life. I set down my inventory of earthly desirables: health, love, talent, power, riches, and fame. Then I proudly…
Havurat Shalom: Draft of a Covenant
We join together in this covenant out of a sense of divine mission, out of a search for the realization of the sacred in our lives as individuals and as brothers and sisters in a community. Though…
Kedushat Levi (Sanctity of Levi)
We recite the blessing “Who performed miracles for our forefathers, etc.” on Hanukkah and Purim, but we do not do so on Passover, even though the Exodus…
An Address on Women’s Rights
October 19, 1851
[E]ven here, in this far-famed land of freedom and of knowledge, under a republic that has inscribed on its banner the great truth that all men are created free and equal and are…
