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.
Ladino Song on the Conversion of Shabbetai Tzvi
Rabbis are becoming angry with our redeemerOur king and the shekhinah is heAnd it is for good and for the good of our King and for the goodof the six hundred thousand of Israel that all followed him …
Dedication (to Gracia Nasi): Consolações às Tribulações de Israel
The heart is prized as the human body’s noblest and most important organ, for it is the first to feel the pain which any other part of the body…
Magen ve-tsina (Shield and Bulwark)
The ten halakhic questions raised by a certain individual directed against the Oral Law, and several of the commentaries upon it, have reached us. I have not needed to carry out a great deal of…
Ma'ayan ganim (A Garden Spring)
The words of a pure woman “more precious than rubies”
whose wish is to attend to studies,
and her name is the gentle Dinah:
She seeks counsel from the wise
for she fears lest her honor may everywhere…
This wonder, this marvel
This wonder, this marvel,
which the deceitful fantasy
Basilisk or Asp believes it to be,
is an error of understanding:
Since if one considers it carefully,
the Divine Providence
is rewarding your…
Peri tsadik (Fruit of the Righteous)
May the bridegroom rejoice and the roses multiply, let sorrows fade away and let the young, old, and simple-minded understand. May the grooms be joyful with strophic poetry (shirot) and songs (renanot…
Bubba Esther, 1888
She was still upset,
she wanted to tell me,
she kept remembering
his terrible hands:
how she came, a young girl
of seventeen, a freckled
fairskinned Jew from Kovno
to Hamburg with her uncle
and…
Lecture with Celan
How many know
the number of creatures is endless?
So many know,
only a gasp in their questions is possible.
All that fullness—
of wounds that won’t scar over.
pain’s grillework
persisting in…
Horse with Object on Head
Several horse figurines have objects on the forehead, like this one. The object may represent the horse’s forelock or mane, or perhaps a decorative ornament. This terra-cotta figurine from the City of…