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.
The Jewish Century
The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually…
New Jerusalem Old Athens: The Holy Middle
This rediscovery of Judaism at the end of the end of philosophy, at the tertium quid, the middle of ethics, occurs at the deepest difficulty of both philosophy and Judaism, where they are equally cast…
Diving into the Wreck
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am…
Woodchucks
Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits…
Jacob the Liar
And the resistance, I will be asked: Where is the resistance? Could it be that the heroes are gathering in the shoe factory or in the freight yard, at least a few? Is it possible that at the ghetto’s…
Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations
[ . . . ] On a terribly cold winter night when a snowstorm was blowing, all prisoners were punished by being forced to stand at attention without overcoats—they never wore any—for hours. This was…
The Chosen
For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence. [ . . . ]
Danny and I probably would never have met—or we…
An Early Reading of Shakespeare
Responding to a growing interest in Shakespeare among the English, Hart’s painting imagines what it might have been like to hear Shakespeare’s works read out loud, shortly after they became available…
Circumcision Bench
In Ashkenazic communities, circumcision benches with two seats were sometimes used from the nineteenth century on, one for the sandek, the godfather on whose lap the baby boy is circumcised, and one…
Portrait of Amalie Beer
The daughter of the wealthiest Jew (Liepmann Meyer Wulff) in Berlin at the turn of the century and married to a wealthy sugar refiner (Jacob Herz Beer), Amalie (Malka) Beer (1767–1854) was a…
Sikhes-khulin (Small Talk, or, The Legend of Prague)
Cover of Sikhes-khulin: Eyne fun di geshikhtn (Small Talk, or, The Legend of Prague) by Moyshe Broderzon, with illustrations by El Lissitzky. The book is an example of a new modernist style that…
Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue
Kneseth Eliyahoo was endowed in honor of Baghdad-born Eliyahoo (Elias) David Sassoon (1820–1880), son of textile magnate David Sassoon (1792–1864), by Elias’s sons. The synagogue was constructed in…