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.
Illustration from Kehunat Avraham (The Priesthood of Abraham)
Kehunat Avraham (The Priesthood of Abraham), completed in Venice in 1719, is an interpretation and retelling of sections from the book of Psalms in verse. The Hebrew text in this illustration comes…
‘Evronot Manuscript (Rules for Calculation of the Calendar)
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
Drawing of the Lebanon War
The Lebanon War of 1982 began on 6 June, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon after repeated attacks and counter-attacks from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon…
Sefer ha-zikhronot (The Book of Remembrances)
[ . . . ] And all the more so with our brethren the people of Israel who come from the lands of the dispersion, who do not know and have not seen the way in which every person called by the name of…
Sefer meyrav (Book of Abundance)
Now the daughter of the King of the Kittim, on hearing this, became highly enraged, and she said, “Is there any room to defend the cause of these people who were lacking in wisdom and set down a…
The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy
In their glory days during the Renaissance, the king’s fools occupied a privileged place at court: dressed in sumptuous garments comparable in every detail to those of the kingdom’s great, in scarlet…
Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment
History will record that as the twentieth century drew to a close, American Jews were facing a political crisis unprecedented in its scope and nature. For the first time in their three and a half…
Making the Bible Come to Life: Biblical Archaeology and the Teaching of Tanakh in Jewish Schools
The fundamental issue surrounding the use of archaeological material to illuminate the Bible duplicates the classic Torah u-Madda question: How ought we to make use of wisdom or learning that can…
From God to Godliness
[…] I will be arguing that, better to understand the God-idea and more effectively overcome the obstacles to the acceptance of God in our lives, we must view theology with a new perception. Elohut…
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…