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.
Modern Judaism in Orient and Occident (East and West)
The author is no novice in this area of research; however, thirty years have passed since he was last engaged deeply in the history of religion. During the ten years of his stay on the banks of the…
Jerusalem
See the Mount of Olives and the Greek monastery.
Minarets and cupolas abound,
Squares of yellow houses like honeycomb.
The valley of Josephat, white, dry fields—
There in the dell, where it is…
Shtetl
A visitor came to the shtetl,
A stranger, with unrest in his step . . .
No-one recognized his unrest. No-one asked him:
“Stranger, are you weary?”
Across the blue sky the evening drew its curtain…
And Cain Spoke unto Abel His Brother
(Genesis 4:8)
for D. G., my uncle
Abel, brother, yesterday the primal crime awoke me:
I had murdered your snow-white dreams and damned I was urging myself
endlessly on down the night-darkening…
In Central Park
Who is to blame that I don’t see your tree,
Garden in snow, my garden in snow.
Who is to blame that I don’t see your tree—
When a woman goes out for a stroll in your snow,
Her bosom rising and…
The Voice
Over and over, yes, over and over,
I shook the pinions of my anger,
Again and again you broke faith with me,
And I stormed at your crop of iniquity.
But over and over, and over and over,
Your songs…
A Stubborn Back—and Nothing More
Come, let us hide ourselves in caves,
in stony crevices, in graves
where stretched full length on the hard ground
we lie, backs up and faces down.
We shall not record, we shall not say
why we’ve…
Three Donkeys
Three donkeys from Beersheba, so they say,
Plodded slowly down the road to Dan one day.
One brown, one black, one white, they went their way.
The three passed by a minaret, and there
The black one…
The Spiritual Upheaval in Israel in the Wake of the Holocaust
When we consider the quotidian life of our society, it is impossible to ignore the phenomenon of “avoidance”; namely, it seems that the public at large is unwilling to think too much about the…
Shards
Now, when my vision turns in on itself,
My shocked eyes open, all their members see
My heart has fallen like a mirror on
A stone and shatters, ringing, into splinters.
Certainly, not every shard is…
You’ll Return with God’s Help
You will come back.
You will, with God’s help, come back
With a far-off, alien look.
(I’m preparing myself,
I already know,
I’ve seen how they come back.)
You will sit in your regular chair, unsure
A…
Yonatan
I run on the bridge
and the children follow
Yonatan
Yonatan they call
a little blood
just a little blood to finish up the honey
I’d let them pierce me with tacks
but the children want
and they are…