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.
Fund for Recruitment and Rescue Poster
This Hebrew-language poster urges Jews in Palestine to lend a hand to the rescue of Jewish refugees. During World War II, Jewish immigration to Palestine was banned by British Mandate authorities. A…
The Honors Student
No, Anton Wanzl was not good. He lacked love, he lacked heart. He did only what he thought was clever and sensible. He gave no love and asked for none. He never needed any affection, any tenderness…
The Queen of Sheba
On the Lord’s hills, white with lustrous light,
Far from rich palaces reeking of wine,
Drunk on the night and sidereal sadness,
The King dreams in self-imposed exile.
Below, mid the wheat, the…
The Binding of Isaac
The Binding of Isaac was painted at a time when Aharon Kahana was developing a new style that favored abstract forms divided by thick lines. His paintings were both an embrace of modern European art…
Yemenite Aliyah to the Land of Israel
I, Shalom, the humble son of the honorable R. Joseph Alsheikh, God keep him and save him, wish to elucidate here the beginning of Yemenite settlement in Jerusalem, may it be built and established…
Title Page of the Register of a Jewish Midwife
This detailed bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish register kept by Roza, a Jewish midwife in the Jewish community of the Dutch city of Groningen in the years from 1794 to 1832, provides basic information about…
Alms Container
This alms container from Charleston, South Carolina, is made of cast and engraved silver. The cartouche on the front features two rampant lions flanking a menorah. The Hebrew inscriptions read:…
Hasidism Encounters Reform and Produces Anarchism
The chief hypocrite of Russia who sold his soul and his ideas to the Hasidim for the price of 2,000 shekels wrote the following: “If any man says, I am a Jew in accordance with the law of Moses (Mende…
Grand Synagogue of Paris
Designed in the neo-Romanesque style of many contemporaneous French churches, the Grand Synagogue of Paris followed the prevailing architectural aesthetic in France, integrating the architectural and…
A Confession Regarding the Jewish Question
So, after all, we have arrived again in a situation where we must confess. We younger ones had felt entitled to the hope that we would gradually succeed in living integrated into the “nation of Kant”…
Atheistic Theology
Jewish thought, having always been in a vital relation to Christian scholarship—sometimes, as in scholasticism, the influencing part, sometimes, as in the 19th century, the influenced part—has…
Truth from the Land of Israel
What more can I add? Will I tell my readers about the disreputable attributes that prevail among those coming from exile, about gratuitous hatred, discord, vain squabbles over a place in the synagogue…