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.
A Call to Collect Jewish Folk Songs
There is no need to provide evidence concerning the great value of folk songs when one wishes to study the history of a people—any people—and all it has undergone. Alongside the history books of each…
Faithful and Free: Collected Speeches and Lectures about Jews and Judaism
One may consider this work a sort of memorial book that captures the history of the Jews and Judaism in our century. It does not narrate stories but reports; it presents personages about whom I was…
A Voice from Balta
I will speak with my heart while my soul is faint, when the spirit of my understanding wanders through the recesses of my worries. My thoughts surely ask me: What is this? And why is this? What is…
What Paths Should Our Movement Take?
The Jewish question may be resolved through a new philosophical synthesis and a true reform of moral and religious life for Jews and Christians alike. Just as we must admit that we need reforms across…
Prophet Marx Speech
Marx was a prophet, no less so than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. With honest conviction and courage he proclaimed the economic liberation of humanity. He appealed to the workers of the world and…
The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It
Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with Patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also…
Interpolation of the Sokolover Rebbe
The [Babylonian] Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin [109b] brings a statement that when a stranger came to the city of Sodom, he would be placed on a bed. Someone who was taller than the bed would have his…
Opening Address of the Jewish Women’s Congress
It is my pleasant duty, as chairman of the local committee, to extend to you all a hearty welcome to our city and to our Congress, the first Jewish Women’s Congress. It was with some misgiving that I…
On the Transfer of the Rabbinical Seminary from Berlin to Eretz Yisrael
[ . . . ] I wrote yesterday to my friend, the illustrious rabbi, our teacher, Rabbi S. Ahronson, and to Rabbi Meir Hildesheimer himself, may his light shine, in a sharp tone, making it clear that I…
Lesser Ury (and Jewish Art)
The strongest testimony to life is productivity, and the most direct form of productivity is art. That is why those of us who announce a life of the Jewish people inquire into the possibility of…
On the Division between Zionism and Religion
[ . . . ] I find myself obliged to commence with a general preface, which I bring to the fore on each occasion that I have occasion to speak about the way of “the Mizrachi” [movement] and its value…
Heine and the Consequences
But Heinrich Heine—even the aesthetes who are rescuing his immortality in an island publishing house (these gloriously impractical minds whose cerebral wrinkles trail away into ornament) have nothing…