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.
Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death
Some time ago it became known that Knut Hamsun was in the habit of expressing his views in an occasional letter to the editor of the local paper in the small town near which he…
A Shtetl Is Starving to Death
Not far from Łódź is a small town called Brzezhin. It has been a town of tailors from the beginning of time. When it was under Russian rule, Brzezhin was a center for manufacturing cheap clothes for…
Jews, Be Nice
The Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has ever been proposed that their historic destiny is—to be nice. This singular concept has played such an important role in…
Antisemitism as Folk Hysteria
To define the characteristics of antisemitism it is good to proceed on two fronts: i.e., to examine its development externally in a purely empirical manner and thereby find its…
“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…