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.
Jezebel
The days of my life pass by, dissolve like mist.
I don’t know the what and when; I don’t know the who.
Baal and Astarte have grown alien to me.
My kingdom and my foes grow alien, too.
I don’t…
Corner of the Field
After a long stay in the city, I was glad to go out, to travel as far as the Sharon, full of eagerness for fields, colors, green light. But to my misfortune, I fell into a crowded bus, crammed…
Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages
This book is intended as a description of a “traditional society”—that is, a society that saw itself as based upon a body of knowledge and a set of values handed down to…
A Culture Stillborn
It is possible to see the promise of a beginning of Levantine literature—rooted in the realities of the Middle East and influenced by European culture—in Le livre de Goha le Simple [Goha the Fool] by…
He Walked through the Fields
Ruthka [checks the pile of clothes lying on the table]:You’ve given him enough clothes to last him for a year.Gita:When one of our members goes away for a while, I don’t want…
Life as a Parable
While my body, in its restlessness, yearned for distances but always inevitably returned to its point of departure, my soul, lacking repose, yearned to travel far into the mighty distances of the…
Mr. Israel Shefi’s Night of Independence
[While the song from the radio can still be heard, Israel sits motionless, in such a way that it is hard to tell whether he is checking a test, thinking, or is just sunk in his place. Later, suddenly…
Isaac
Early in the morning the sun took a walk in the woods
with me and my father
my right hand in his left.
A knife flashed between the trees like lightning.
And I’m so scared of the fear in my eyes…
The Cobbler’s Song
Shlomo reclines within his shrine
Woe to my days, woe to my nights
Everyone knows how he is
Nobody knows about me
Woe to my days, woe to my nights
As if it means something to anybody.
If I have a…
Transfiguration
In history class
I draw a Latin-American moustache
On Titus Aspasianus;
Miriam, who under her flannel shirt
Is beginning to show development,
Is making vulgar contours
Onto the sculpture of his bust…
Nostalgia
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget itself.Give us the land we have wandered in timeThrough foreign parts, far, so far and then,Every year at Passover we repeat the lineNext year…
Account of His Visit to Lublin
I was privileged to visit Lublin with my late father when I was a boy of nine, and I saw his [the Seer’s] face illuminated like torches. And when he opened the door to recite Ke-gavnah [An Aramaic…