House Style

The voice

We write as proud, confident members of a very old tribe - never as complainants, never as guests hoping not to cause a fuss. The register is wry but emotionally weighted: warmth and wit on the surface, real feeling underneath, and the occasional short sentence that lands like a dropped stone. If a draft sounds defensive, aggrieved, or apologetic, it isn't ours yet.

• Joy before grievance. The public account of Jewish life cannot only be Jewish death and Jewish pain. We tell the story of what we are, not merely what was done to us. Pain may appear; it never gets the last word.
• Confidence, not defensiveness. We never argue for our right to exist, our right to a story, or our right to a place. We proceed from all three and get on with the interesting part.
• Story and stone, clearly marked. The legends are ours and we tell them with pride - as narrative, not as lab results. The evidence is dated, sourced and checkable. Every piece carries both registers, visibly separated. Neither apologises to the other.
• Criticism embedded in love. We can be sharp about institutions, including our own - but only as people who share the freehold, never as stone-throwers from the street.
• No self-pity. It's unattractive and unhelpful. Clarity instead.
• The wider world is a comparison, not a target. The Navajo, the Māori, the Qataris - other tribes appear here with respect, to illuminate, never to score points. We don't do partisan politics, and we don't abuse named individuals.
• Mechanics. Hyphens, not em-dashes. Contractions throughout. British spelling. Short sentences at the moments that matter. One heat-beat of personal specificity per piece - a grandmother, a kitchen table - and no more.

The two registers

The site's signature convention. Narrative prose sits on vellum, in Newsreader, and may say "the story tells us" without blushing. Evidence sits in basalt blocks - dark, dated, incised - and must be checkable: an object, a place it can be seen, a date defensible to a scholar. The reader learns the grammar inside one article and can then trust it everywhere. Don't blur them. The whole design is a promise about which is which.

The look

The palette comes from the tribe's own materials: the indigo of the techelet thread, vellum, Jerusalem stone, basalt, gold leaf, pomegranate. Gold is reserved for one job - marking persistence. On the map, the gold lights are the communities; in articles, gold rules mark the commentary. Don't spend it on decoration.

Anatomy of a piece

Every article carries: an eyebrow naming its series; a title that would survive being said aloud at a dinner table; a standfirst that earns the click honestly; narrative prose in the story register; at least two stone blocks; margin notes in the daf tradition - commentary wrapped round the text, the tribe's own information architecture, in use five hundred years before hypertext; one pull quote at most; a timeline strip where chronology helps; and end matter pointing to the next piece. Length: whatever the story needs, then ten per cent less.

The daf margin notes

Margin notes are commentary, not footnotes - they speak, they don't merely cite. The base .note is general-purpose. Three typed variants carry specific meanings, and the label (inside <strong>) makes the type legible at a glance:

• .note--stone - "Stone." The sourced note: an object location, a precise date, a checkable fact. Rendered in basalt and Jerusalem stone to echo the stone-block register. A museum or collection is always named.
• .note--dispute - "The argument." A live scholarly disagreement, stated fairly. Techelet accent. Two positions, no verdict - the margin doesn't settle arguments, it surfaces them.
• .note--aside - "Aside." The joke, the wry remark, the thing too good to cut. Pomegranate label - the warmest accent in the palette. One per piece is usually one too many, unless it's genuinely funny.

Any note type may include a .note-more block of extended commentary, collapsed by default and revealed by a "Continue" toggle. The margin never shouts; depth lives behind a click. On mobile the note is already a boxed aside - the toggle works there too.

The draft convention

Every new article carries data-status="draft" on the <body> element. This renders a thin pomegranate banner above the hero reading "Draft - awaiting the owner's revision round". Nothing ships to readers until the owner has completed her revision round; promoting a piece is a single attribute change to data-status="live", which the CSS uses to hide the banner automatically. The library.js status field mirrors this: pieces move from draft to review to live as the pipeline progresses.

Pitching

Send a paragraph: the story, the stone that backs it, and the feeling a reader should leave with. If we take it, you'll work with an editor through named revision rounds - we're precise, and we're kind, and we're firm about the order of those two things. The tribe has been editing its own story for three thousand years. You'll be in good company.