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.
Palestine and World Jewry
This will be the first of my addresses before the Zionist Congresses to deal not with the various questions involved in the upbuilding of Palestine but with the significance of…
Women’s Farming Schools Abroad: Travel Notes and Impressions
This trip abroad to study the function of women’s agricultural schools was accomplished via a partnership of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce with the Humanitarian Society, which, at the end…
Prepared
A searing poetic response to a 1916 survey, by Martha Gruening, a tireless advocate for women’s rights and African American rights.
Yontev-bletlekh: “Why Is This Night Different (Ma nishtanah)?”
Passover is coming soon and I ask you to invite me to the seder. Let me in!I won’t cost you very much. I don’t eat kneydlekh! Don’t serve me maror, the bitter herbs—I was born with them!Do not ask me…
The Mind of the Orient
All philosophy—understood in the widest sense as awe before and research into the inexplicable secrets and the inner coherence of the world—is meaningful not for the sake of knowledge but as a form of…
Ghetto Twilight
An infinite weariness comes into the faces of the old tenements,
As they stand massed together on the block,
Tall and thoughtful silent,
In the enveloping twilight.
Pensively,
They eye each other…
Address to West Central Jewish Working Girls’ Club
Today for you all there is an opportunity more important than any that has ever before been given to you.
The boys out in France and Egypt are learning the value of their homes. We believe that they…
Day and Night
Day and night—
Shivering, we wait in bitter day
For moonlit night,
For the caressing moon.
Quivering, we wait in angry night—
For the sunlit day,
For the warming sun.
Day and night—
We must loom…
Transformation
Year after year, that cruel monster in the heart
growing, sense of guardedness expanding.
Year after year—generations’ blessing
gouged like a needle into the body.
I have wrenched it with irons…
Friends of My Age!
Friends of my age,
My happy generation,
We strode, pained-pleased,
Through the wreckage of whole worlds.
Before the living and the dead
fell on our portion
Inherited old skins
of ourselves—and…
A Series of Verses to the Venerable Ancient Whose Portrait Hangs in the Window of a Lottery Agency
The Avenida de Mayo
glows with a virginal light beneath the Sabbath sky.
That light strikes
the window pane that displays your portrait:
Laban amidst a flock of gaily colored lottery
tickets, green…
Tropic Nightmare in Singapore
Seven continents, seven seas,
and two and forty years—
and torrid equatorial nights
filled with nightmare fears.
Open eyes, naked heart.
And draining blood from me,
mosquitoes buzzing, buzzing…