Q&A with Dr. Ruth R. Wisse
“Jews can do a great deal for the future of democracy if they can stand up to some of the most dangerous aggressors in the world today.”
By Cindy Mindell
Dr. Ruth Wisse
Scholar and literary and social critic Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University.
She received a 2007 National Humanities Medal for her “scholarship and teaching that have illuminated Jewish literary traditions” and her insightful writings that “have enriched our understanding of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture in the modern world.” She credits her passion for teaching to the Jewish immigrants who were her teachers in Montreal: “I had brilliant teachers at my Jewish day school. These young men had no better opportunities. They were displaced intellectuals and went into primary education to our extraordinary benefit. They were engaged with life. At an early age I saw the calling of literature and teaching as inseparable from civic responsibility.”
Wisse is a member of the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books and a frequent contributor to Commentary magazine. Her books on literary subjects include an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir, “The Glatstein Chronicles” (New Yiddish Library Series, 2010); “The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture “(Free Press, 2000), and “A Little Love in Big Manhattan” (Harvard University Press, 1988). She is also the author of two political studies – “If I Am Not for Myself…: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews” (Free Press,1992) and “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007). Her latest book, “No Joke: Mocking Jewish Humor,” a volume in the Tikvah-sponsored Library of Jewish Ideas, is forthcoming in spring 2013 from Princeton.
On Thursday, Oct. 4, Wisse will deliver the 28th Annual Harold E. Hoffman Memorial Lecture at Temple Beth El in Stamford on the topic of “Anti-Semitism and Tikkun Olam: How Jews Can Best Repair a World in Crisis.”
She spoke with the Ledger about how Jews must rise above the peculiar problem of “Jewish politics” to face a task no less critical than our ultimate survival.
Q: What motivates you to ask and address the central question in your talk?
A: It’s not such a difficult question to answer. My field of concentration has been Yiddish literature and modern Jewish literature; it exposes you to the realities of Jewish life in the 19th and 20th centuries. Those realities have been fairly brutal – not exclusively brutal but cumulatively so.
If there is any field of study that forces you to concentrate on what goes wrong in Jewish history, it is the study of Jewish literature. Many Yiddish writers were themselves concerned with the growing threats to Jewish life and, in reading this literature, quite naturally I became interested in one of the areas in which Jews have not excelled, and that is in politics. So the two things are not wildly dissimilar, and in my case, I just felt that one field led me to concentrate also on the other. I write about Yiddish literature and just finished a book on modern Jewish humor. I have also written two books about politics, “If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews,” and “Jews and “Power.”
Q: What is the central problem of “Jewish politics?”
A: There is something very exceptional about Jewish politics, and something that can be tested empirically: Jewish politics is different from the politics of most other nations, and Jewish politics is not only different from, but antithetical to, the nations that target the Jews. It does not make sense for Jews to blame themselves for the aggression leveled against them, or to think that they can compensate for the harm that other peoples, for example, Arab nations, do to one another.
As I write in “Jews and Power,” the animus against the Jews has not been directed to any correctable attribute or rectifiable lapses in them.
Q: Briefly, how can Jews best repair a world in crisis, as suggested in the theme of your Oct. 4 talk?
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