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.
In the Image
Before her death, Naomi had dragged Bill Landsmann to enough Holocaust movies that he knew exactly what would happen in them. His son and daughter-in-law knew better than to…
On Seeing the Statuettes of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame
They have given you French namesand made you captive, my ruggedtroublesome compatriots;your splendid beards, are epicene,plaster whiteand your angersunclothed with Palestinian hills quite lostin this…
Kashrut
Setting up a kosher home is not at all difficult once one gets the hang of what one is and is not allowed to do and eat. There is sometimes an unfortunate tendency among those just beginning to keep…
Wasteland
He carried his camera and case into the dining room, and as he stood there for a moment, peering at the table through the twilight haze in the room, he breathed deeply of the familiar holiday odors…
Notes from the American Revolution
I have returned from a war—a revolutionary war fought without firearms, without generals, without front lines. For ammunition, the smoldering spirit of the black people of America, like a gusher of…
Ḥavvot Yair (Villages of Yair): A Curriculum of Study
[Question:] A certain gentleman, a close and trusted friend, a Torah scholar who had read scripture, learned Mishnah, and ministered to many learned talmudic scholars, invited me to come to the holy…
World of Our Fathers
To think of the culture brought over by the immigrant Jews as a “mere” folk culture is a patronizing error, though an error often indulged in by later generations of American Jews. There was, of…
The New York Intellectuals
We were living directly after the Holocaust of the European Jews. We might scorn our origins; we might crush America with discoveries of ardor; we might change our names. But we knew that but for an…
Le-‘eyne kol Yisra’el (In the Sight of All Israel)
They distort the words of the living God. It is a clear Torah lesson, as the sages have taught: “Whosoever speculates on four things, a pity for him! He is as though he had not come into the world.”Th…
Don Iudá
Just then Don Iudá took off his coat and greeted us one by one. My mother, out of breath as we’d been in such a hurry to come, explained everything in short choppy phrases.We children would stay there…
Colophon: Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah
And we, in our humble opinion, state that it was done well, although the labor was very great, and it ran very quickly, and according to our sharpness of wit at that time we examined it well, for we…
Ferocious Animals
Benleví:[while he speaks, Sara enters with the slippers] All they do in the synagogue is talk about Ishmael.Sara:[bent over, putting on the slippers] They seem to forget that they’re there to talk to…