Texts, traditions, language and ideas from Jewish life that have enriched the wider world.
The Hebrew Bible's Jubilee year, when debts were forgiven and land restored, gave the Liberty Bell its inscription and inspired the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel poor nations' debt.
Read the full story →The Jewish Sabbath made a day of rest every seventh day a sacred duty; through Christianity that seven-day week spread across the Roman Empire and then the world.
Read the full story →In third-century BCE Alexandria, Jews translated the Torah into Greek: the Septuagint, the earliest Greek Bible, later the Old Testament of the early Christian church.
Read the full story →The Talmud records the teachings and disagreements of thousands of rabbis across 63 tractates, keeping minority views alongside majority rulings and teaching readers to argue well.
Read the full story →Tikkun olam, 'repairing the world', began as a rabbinic principle for keeping society fair and became a call for Jews to care for the welfare of society at large.
Read the full story →Every Torah scroll is copied by hand, all 304,805 letters, and one error can make it invalid; that discipline preserved the Hebrew text on which most Bible translations rest.
Read the full story →Yiddish, born among medieval Jews in the Rhineland, grew to 11–13 million speakers and produced a literature honoured with a Nobel Prize and adapted into Fiddler on the Roof.
Read the full story →On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, tradition holds that atonement for wrongs against other people requires first asking them for forgiveness.
Read the full story →In 1921 Chaim Weizmann asked Albert Einstein to help raise money for a planned Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Einstein toured America for the cause, and the university opened in 1925.
Read the full story →In 1997 the Anne Frank Educational Centre opened in Frankfurt's Dornbusch district, where Anne lived until 1934, as a place to learn about National Socialism and its lessons today.
Read the full story →The building where Anne Frank hid was saved from demolition by a foundation formed in 1957 and opened as the Anne Frank House museum on 3 May 1960.
Read the full story →Saplings from the horse-chestnut tree Anne Frank watched from her hiding place have been planted at museums, schools and memorials, including Little Rock and a 9/11 memorial park.
Read the full story →Arnold Schoenberg's 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw, for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, ends with prisoners singing the Shema as they face death.
Read the full story →Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, composed 1930–32, dramatises the Jewish idea of a God who cannot be pictured, through the clash of two brothers.
Read the full story →Arthur Miller's 1994 play Broken Glass, set in Brooklyn after Kristallnacht, is his most direct exploration of American Jewish identity.
Read the full story →Arthur Miller's 1964 play Incident at Vichy, about men detained in wartime France to be checked for Jewishness, asks what responsibility each of us bears for others.
Read the full story →Arthur Miller wrote Playing for Time (1980), a television drama based on Fania Fénelon's memoir of surviving Auschwitz by playing in its women's orchestra.
Read the full story →About 6,000 of Bob Dylan's notebooks, lyric drafts, recordings and letters were acquired for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Bob Dylan Center opened to the public on 10 May 2022.
Read the full story →Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Read the full story →As chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust from 1978 to 1986, Elie Wiesel spearheaded the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993.
Read the full story →After the Nazis barred her from teaching in 1933, Emmy Noether gathered students in her apartment to keep doing mathematics, unruffled even when one arrived in SA uniform.
Read the full story →In 1840 Felix Mendelssohn began a project for a monument to J. S. Bach in Leipzig, funding it with three concerts and paying the rest from his own fortune; it was unveiled in 1843.
Read the full story →NobelPrize.org describes Imre Kertész's novels as part of witness literature, in which an author writes about trauma from personal experience.
Read the full story →For his 1949 musical Miss Liberty, Irving Berlin set the closing lines of Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" to music as "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor".
Read the full story →Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary, kept during the Polish-Soviet War, recorded the horrors he witnessed; it was finally published in 1990.
Read the full story →Isaac Babel translated Sholem Aleichem from Yiddish into Russian and wrote for early Soviet Yiddish-themed films, including Jewish Luck (1925) and Wandering Stars.
Read the full story →In his 1978 Nobel lecture, Isaac Bashevis Singer paid tribute to Yiddish as a language of exile that had no words for weapons and still held treasures for the world.
Read the full story →In God Knows (1984), Joseph Heller gave voice to the biblical King David, after first drawing on his Jewish roots in Good as Gold (1979).
Read the full story →Joseph Roth’s 1930 novel Job, about Mendel Singer’s search for God, made him famous as a novelist and was filmed in Hollywood in 1936.
Read the full story →Germany's national biography calls Joseph Roth one of the most important portrayers of Eastern European Jewish life, a world later largely destroyed.
Read the full story →From 1978, aged 91, Marc Chagall created windows for St Stephan's church in Mainz as a sign of Jewish-Christian friendship, in a city once called the capital of European Jewry.
Read the full story →For the 1921 opening of Moscow's State Jewish Chamber Theatre, Marc Chagall painted huge murals of dancers, fiddlers and acrobats that became a landmark in theatre history.
Read the full story →Marc Chagall's paintings of Vitebsk, its fiddlers, rabbis and wooden houses, became the most important visual record of East European Jewish life, and inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Read the full story →In a 1904 Le Figaro article, 'The Death of Cathedrals', Marcel Proust called Gothic cathedrals the most original expression of French genius.
Read the full story →Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner brought new life to Brundibár, a children's opera performed by Jewish children in the Theresienstadt camp, as a 2003 book and stage production.
Read the full story →Maimonides, court physician and author of the first full code of Jewish law, ranked eight levels of charity; the highest helps a person become self-sufficient.
Read the full story →Nelly Sachs's verse play Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel was written in memory of those who perished in the Nazi camps.
Read the full story →Nelly Sachs's 1947 collection In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Houses of Death) made her a poignant voice for the grief of her people.
Read the full story →After the secret police seized Osip Mandelstam's manuscripts, his wife Nadezhda memorised his poems and later arranged for them to be published.
Read the full story →Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge' ('Death Fugue'), a stark evocation of life in the Nazi camps, became one of the most widely anthologised poems of the Holocaust.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”