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.
Jeshurun
Jeshurun sings when they see him
Tender beauty in her youth
She plays and her violin is on her bosom
And its singing brings gladness to the heart of the gloomy
An unadorned graceful gazelle
Embellish…
X-Rays
Work, tradesmen, shops, the town is there
with old maids polished down by emptiness
on haberdashers’ threshold where the antique sun
brushes off jewels dusty with being looked at.
Dressed up for…
Moon
An old sight too has its moment of birth.
A birdless sky
Strange and set apart.
Facing your widow on the moonlit night stands
A city plunged in crickets’ tears.
And when you see a road still…
Three Foundations (Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish Literary Tradition)
[ . . . ] Why is fame accorded to this particular individual, far and beyond his own time and place and why does he continue to capture new readers both in the original and in translation? [ . . . P…
The Voice
On a forgone and alien diaspora night,
Far, far in the midst of childhood,
A heavy bottomless darkness closed upon me,
Surrounding me in fear and horror.
Somewhere in Yemen in the district of…
Twelve Faces of the Emerald
I am exceedingly green: chill green.
What have I to do
with all the greenishness of chance?
I am the green-source, the green-self,
one and incomparable.
On Seeing the Statuettes of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame
They have given you French names
and made you captive, my rugged
troublesome compatriots;
your splendid beards, are epicene,
plaster white
and your angers
unclothed with Palestinian hills quite lost…
The Challenge Facing Modern Jewish Scholarship
[ . . . ] Moreover, the ideal of Torah as an end in itself was never felt to be in opposition to the ideal of Torat hayyim—“the Torah as a gateway to life.” Whatever the logician might argue…
The Alphabet
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are…
Acclimatization
I forget meticulously
I forget scrupulously
my native landscape
my daily landscape
I forget the ragged
I forget the billowy
clouds in a sky
clouds over a town
I forget to the end
I forget…
A Dirge for the Ninth of Av
Let us chant, my brothers,
this dirge together,
for God severed our hands
by this disaster.