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.
“Americanization” and the Cultural Prospect
That the image of these United States as a “melting-pot” might be a delusion and its imputed harmony with democracy a snare was not an idea which, prior to the Great War, seemed even possible to…
Our Cultural Work
At the last council meeting of the Histadrut, the question of cultural work was on the agenda for the first time. This time it was impossible to discuss only the formal and technical aspects of our…
The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival
Let us bless the source of lifethat brings forth bread from the earth.N’vareykh et eyn haḥayimhamotzi’ah léḥem min ha’áretz.Hear, O Israel…
Hatikva
In 1947, when Kurt Weill’s orchestral arrangement of Hatikva received its world premiere in New York, it was still—as it had been for decades—the anthem of the modern Zionist movement, expressing the…
American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots
What we now routinely call klezmer in the United States—“Do you play klezmer?” “There’s a new klezmer album out”—is a truly American construct in three ways: the word sidesteps aesthetic and political…
’Hirbet Hizah’: Between Remembrance and Forgetting
The debate in 1978 was not cathartic. It was just the opposite. Here we have something of a textbook example of the reciprocity between the present and collective memory: at…
The Kultura Work
The perceived role of the national culture in the Zionist Eretz-Israeli context was to shape the new Jewish society created in the land of Israel and to give it overall content. It aimed to shape the…
New Jews, Old Jews
…The rationalist model related to Jewish history and the Diaspora as accidents that could be corrected. It did not devote much thought to the past, but…
The Limestone
If it forms the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,Are constantly homesick for, this is chieflyBecause it dissolves in water.—Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”If beauty and truth were to overlap…
Outsider
The moment she entered the room, she noticed something suspicious out of the corner of her eye. Dror and Koby stood next to her bed and pretended to tie their shoelaces. She knew…
In the City and in the Forest
1. The Waters of Strife (Meribah)What is it between me and you, O man of God, that you have come to me to remind me of my sin? (1 Kings 17:18)Drops of oil fell into the pitcher of water. A clamor and…
The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln
It is not a grave that opens up to us in this book, but a human heart. The memoirs that are now seeing the light for the first time would have deserved to be published a long time…