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.
Apology for Judaism
The Messiah of Israel does not come to redeem men from some original sin they never committed, nor from sins which they can liberate themselves of every day, through divine mercy and their own powers…
Sephardi, Not Oriental
I have noticed the change of the word “Oriental” to “Sephardi” in the masthead of the latest issue of the journal [La Amerika], “Organ of the Judeo-Sephardi (and no longer Oriental) Colony of America…
One Literature in Two Languages
Some impassioned readers among us will not admit that our one and only literature has a double language. After the Czernowitz conference, one of our Hebrew writers (now living in America) swore…
Turkish Music in the Synagogue: Objections of a Rabbi
The sinyor Rav h"r Shaul had a strong aversion to the Turkish language to the extent that he would excommunicate anyone singing Turkish songs. Not only Turkish songs, but even a Jewish liturgical…
Lamentations
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
After Havdaleh
“ . . . And all those who are on the left side go and wander in the world and seek to dress themselves in the body.”—From Zohar Beraishit
When the Havdoleh candle is extinguished,
In Gehenna, the…
We’re Laughing Our Heads Off
We’re laughing our heads off:
None of us wears a top-hat
We just go around with heads—or without heads—
But the Rabbi of Uman
Holds up a mirror to the sun.
We laugh our heads off
When a gang comes…
Purim Eve, a One-Act Comedy
Cast [in this passage]Abraham Levi: Rich merchantAneta: Abraham Levi’s wifeMax, Yosef, and Aron: Abraham and Aneta Levi’s sonsFrida and Klerchen: Abraham and Aneta Levi’s daughtersShmuel Natan: Zionis…
Verses to a Dictionary and to the Neckerchiefs (Worn by the Gauchos)
With you, it is not impossible to define
creatures and things with the simplicity
of the fish whose scales streak the sea with blue and gold,
Or of the sea itself that swells with the gracefulness of…
The Killers of the Fields
In ascetic silence, in stony skirts,God’s handmaid falls on her face—Flash of an empty night, a forlorn desert waste,Shards of sunset upon the rocks.This land. Trodden, just like this, by a wandering…
The Madonna in the Subway
Across from me in the subway sat the madonna
Crossing her legs,
Bending over a tabloid.
She read about a cashier-girl who jumped into the water
When her bridegroom left her with a rising belly.
The…
O Quickly, Messiah
O quickly, Messiah, come quickly at last,
The world is engirdled with serpents, in vast
Poisonous circles of famine and care,
Terror and torment, decay and despair;
The earth has denied men the…