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For Colleges

For Colleges

The whole arc, from the sources.
Free for your courses, your students, and your community.
A study hall of the Slabodka Yeshiva, which moved from Lithuania to Hebron in 1924 and taught the Mussar path of ethical character and the greatness of the human being.

The record stays current through two living registers: The Legal Record, judgments and statutes updated quarterly, and the Incident Record, documented incidents each ending with a verdict, a plea, or an official finding. For the campus record itself, the hearings, resolution agreements, and rulings since October 7 are kept entry by entry on the Legal Record.

The Makor Project is a free, source-based online textbook of Jewish history and of antisemitism, from antiquity through the Holocaust to the present. Every claim is sourced, and every source is credited to the museum or archive that holds it. It is open to everyone, and on a campus it serves three ways: as reading for college courses, for incoming students, and for the community your institution serves.

For facultyIn college courses

Makor is organized as six Units and 59 Chapters, each a readable history followed by the primary sources it is built on. For an instructor, that is a free, source-based textbook: the text for a new course, or Chapters folded into ones you already teach. A complete 14-week sample syllabus for a college survey is on the Sample Syllabi page, and the eight Makor Teaching Guides, written for schools but mapped to the same chapters, plan the survey ground too: an era-by-era world history chart, the American thread from 1654, and the history of antisemitism laid out as a course. It maps onto far more courses than the obvious ones:

  • World and Western civilization, where the Jewish story belongs beside Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
  • Art history, from ancient synagogue mosaics and illuminated manuscripts to the work of modern Jewish artists.
  • Archaeology, the coins, mosaics, inscriptions, and sites that document the Jewish past.
  • Anthropology, a living civilization read through its communities, customs, and material culture.
  • Psychology, the mechanics of prejudice, obedience, and dehumanization.
  • Philosophy and ethics, from Maimonides to Arendt on the nature of evil.
  • Medieval studies, the expulsions, the blood libel, and the Church teaching behind them.
  • American history and immigration, the American Jewish story and the nativism it met.
  • Race and civil rights in America, prejudice, scapegoating, and the fight for equal standing, with the Jewish experience alongside.
  • The Arab and Islamic world, thirteen centuries of Jewish life under Islamic rule.
  • Middle East studies, the modern State of Israel and the region to the present day.
  • Modern European history, emancipation, the pogroms, and the racial turn of 1879.
  • Political science and government, nationalism, statelessness, minority rights, and the nation-state.
  • Human rights and international law, Nuremberg and the foundations of modern international justice.
  • Law and legal studies, the Dreyfus Affair, the Nuremberg Laws, and the trials that followed.
  • Introductions to Judaism, and Jewish history, the full arc from antiquity to the present.
  • The history and mechanics of antisemitism, from its origins to today’s record.
  • Holocaust and genocide studies, the centuries that led to it and the decades after.
  • Comparative religion and world religions, Judaism given the same reach as the other traditions: the sacred texts, the calendar, the synagogue, the life cycle, and the long encounters with Christianity and Islam.

Assign a Chapter as weekly reading and send students to the sources it cites, or draw on the Timeline and the Museum for a lecture. Nothing sits behind a paywall or a login. Begin with Unit 1, or browse the whole arc.

Research and a primerFor your students

Students can work from Makor directly, for research papers, essays, and source-based projects. The student entry point, For Students, lays out research topics across the whole history, shows how to work from evidence, and connects the history to books and courses they are already taking.

It also serves as a primer. An incoming or first-year student can read the whole story before a course begins, and arrive with the whole story rather than two disconnected moments, the ancient world and the Holocaust, with the centuries between them left out.

How it is madeBuilt from the record

The method is strict and plain. Every claim is anchored in a primary document, a work of scholarship, or an institutional archive, and every source is credited so a reader can trace it. The aim is not to argue a conclusion but to lay out the record and let readers draw their own.

A few Chapters that show the range and the rigor:

The Sources page sets out the method, and the directory of archives and scholarship behind the work.

Share and partnerYour campus and the community it serves

Makor is also a resource for the community around your campus: a free, nonpartisan reference anyone can read. Campus offices and programs that share educational resources with their communities are welcome to list it.

If Makor would be useful to your campus or your students, we would be glad to talk. Get in touch.

The Makor Project is free and open to everyone, and always will be. For classroom materials, see For Teachers; for the student entry point, see For Students. To discuss how it might serve your campus and community, get in touch. · Return home

Last updated: September 2026.