A large and very appreciative audience was treated to a thrilling lecture on Sunday, May 7, by Ruth R. Wisse, the Martin Peretz professor emerita of Yiddish literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and noted lecturer. She addressed “Are American Jews their Own Worst Enemies?”—a question she answered mostly by saying, “Because Jews face real enemies, they must do a better job of identifying and confronting them.”
A young, energetic and spry 81 (her birthday is this month, so mazel tov, and until 120), Prof. Wisse is a unique figure in American Jewish letters. She bridges the worlds of Yiddish and American culture, of literature and politics, and of Israel and the Diaspora. After teaching for many years at McGill, Stanford, New York, Hebrew and Tel Aviv universities, she taught at Harvard from 1993 until she became Emerita in 2014 and moved to Manhattan.
President George Bush presented her with the National Humanities Medal in 2007. Her academic colleagues honored her with a festschrift, a collection of writings published in tribute of a scholar. “Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse” was published by Harvard University Press in 2008.
Prof. Wisse was born in Tchernowitz, in the Ukraine, home to the Talmudist Rav Chaim Tchernowitz, known as Rav Za’ir (1871–1949), a talmid muvhak (dedicated student—see Bava Metzia 33a, Shulchan Aruch YD 242:30) of Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor of Kovno (1817-1896), for whom the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), part of Yeshiva University is named.
She grew up in Montreal where she was much influenced by the Yiddishe Folks Schule (Jewish People’s School), a politically and religiously centrist elementary school she attended as a child. It formed the core of her underlying philosophy that the Jewish people is one entity, and “everything Jewish belongs in it” in Israel and the Diaspora.
Prof. Wisse originally made her mark in Yiddish studies, influenced to go in that direction by the acclaimed Yiddish Zionist poet Avrom Sutzkever (1913–2010), whom the New York Times crowned as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” Her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Schlemiel as Modern Hero,” published as a book in 1971, was a landmark study of the now-famous character type and its role in Jewish literature. Wisse showed how the schlemiel was a reflection of Jewish culture in the Diaspora, and of its strategies for coping with persecution and powerlessness.
She sees Yiddish as a language of the youth, with vitality, inventing Jewish modernity. One of the values of studying Yiddish, she believes, is to understand the culture of America, much of which stemmed from the rich folk culture of Yiddish. Yiddish stemmed from a society that was isolated from the surrounding cultures. Upon arrival in America, most Jews encouraged their children to blend into the prevailing American success story, and as a result Yiddish has practically disappeared, outside of charedi circles that seek to deliberately isolate themselves from American society. In this, she argues with those who overhype the degree to which Yiddish has been revived.
As a gifted and inspiring teacher, Prof. Wisse has attracted many students. Among her famous students are Dr. Jeremy Dauber, the Atran professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia, who grew up in Teaneck; novelist Dr. Dara Horn, another New Jerseyite, and currently holding the Gerald Weinstock visiting professorship in Jewish studies at Harvard; and Dr. Aaron Lansky, a MacArthur fellow and founder of the Yiddish Book Center at Amherst, which salvages Yiddish-language publications.
But she is much more than a scholar of Yiddish.
The range of her writing is prodigious. She wrote a 1995 critique of Leonard Cohen (1934–2016), the singer, songwriter, musician, poet and novelist)—she characterized it as “swaddled in appreciation and love, nonetheless reflected my disappointment over Leonard’s choice”; he responded acerbically, terming it “reckless evaluation of my life and work,” but after his passing penned a sensitive obituary, following the Jewish principle of Acharei mot kedoshim emor (the first words of three consecutive parshiyot in Leviticus)—Speak kindly of the deceased who can’t defend themselves. This aphorism is known in Latin as De mortuis aut bene aut nihil. It’s a Jewish principle, whose oldest-known reference is by the Jewish scholar, poet and scientist Immanuel of Rome (1261–1328) in his “Machberet” (1:8) (Cantos) and was later explained by Sholem Yankev Abramovich (1836-1917), known to us as Mendele Mocher Seforim, his literary pseudonym, whose novellas Wisse edited as “A Shtetl and other Yiddish Novellas” (1986).
She had a long, mostly cordial but sometimes contentious relationship with Nobel prize-winning author Saul Bellow (1925–2005); they disagreed about anti-Semitism. She said of their relationship, “I shared a love of literature and of Yiddish, but our friendship was tested by decades-long disagreements over politics.”
In Teaneck, she spoke about things beyond the Academy.
A long-time contributor to the neoconservative “Commentary,” which claims to be “anchored in these principles: to maintain, sustain and cultivate the future of the Jewish people; to bear witness against anti-Semitism and defend Zionism and the State of Israel; to take inventory in and increase the storehouse of the best that has been thought and said; and to stand with and for the West and its finest flowering, the United States,” Dr. Wisse is an ardent and life-long supporter of Israel; she and her husband, the attorney Leonard Wisse, whom she met as an undergraduate, are key sponsors of very pro-Israel CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Wisse has fearlessly spoken out on issues of importance to Jews. No shrinking violet, she pulls no punches. She once accused The New Yorker of “hate-mongering” when it came to Israel, and called The New York Review of Books “the Women’s Wear Daily of the American intelligentsia” for its “responsiveness to fashion.” Books like “If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews” (1992) and “Jews and Power” (2008), dedicated to its then-editor Neal Kozodoy (now editor of Mosaic and the Library of Jewish Ideas) established her as a conservative on social, cultural and political issues. Edward Alexander wrote of her in 1993, “Ruth Wisse is worth a battalion,” a statement he ascribed to a colonel in the Israeli army he dates to 1988. She argues that the so-called “occupation” is a “consequence of the Arab war against the Jews” and cannot be seen retroactively as its cause. “In other words, unless you give me human rights and, in the Jewish case, national rights, that precedes anything that we give. That’s difficult for us because we’re a minority used to accommodating. We’ve never learned it had to precede anything else. You can’t win it. You can’t earn it. This is our major task, and I don’t want to be deflected.”
She was interviewed extensively by Bill Kristol, editor at large of The Weekly Standard, (http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/ruth-wisse-transcript/) on anti-Semitism, Israel on campus, the university in decline and on Yiddish literature.
In Teaneck, she was largely preaching to an approving choir.
She asked, “Are American Jews their Own Worst Enemies?” and concluded they are not, as they have all-too-real enemies, and they are obliged to confront them, like it or not. On the one hand, misinformed and often misguided Jews of leftist persuasion unquestioningly accept the anti-Semitic = anti-Zionist claims of Israel’s enemies, while centrist and right-leaning Jews disagree privately, and amongst themselves, but fear to speak out. These two responses may seem puzzling, as American Jews rejected Nazism and also the witch-hunting of the Communists in the McCarthy era. But Dr. Wisse noted that Jews are comfortable protesting evil as part of a crowd, but often fear to protest when it’s just we who are the targets.
In her talk, she repeatedly referred to Israel as reshit tzmichat geulateinu, the initial sprouting of the redemption. This curious phrase, which was incorporated in the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel by its authors, Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog (1888–1959) assisted by Nobel Prize Laureate Shmuel Yosef (Shai) Agnon (1888–1970), was first used (apparently for the first time) by the mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1811–1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and the founder of Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav Kook; at the time he was still the rav of Yaffo. It’s a religious, mystical expression that reflects the nationalist religious Jewish messianic longings underpinning the religious Zionist movement. It would hardly be found on the lips of most academics.
Rabbi Dr. J. J. Schacter, university professor of Jewish history and Jewish thought and senior scholar at the Center for the Jewish Future at Yeshiva University, asked, in his very effusive introduction, why Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, were both punished (Lev. 9:22-24). The Talmud teaches us (Sanhedrin 52a), “Nadav said to Avihu, ‘When these two elders die, you and I will lead this generation.’” So Nadav was the bad guy. What was Avihu’s offense? He remained silent. His fatal offense was that he did not confront evil. In stark contrast, Prof. Wisse has confronted evil all her life. She distinguishes generic discrimination, which, she argues, took the worst toll on African-Americans from specific anti-Jewish hostility, blaming Jews specifically for the evils of modern society and a myriad of other societal ills. Almost no one today admits to anti-Semitism; the Holocaust made it unacceptable. In contrast, anti-Zionism is today viewed as socially acceptable. Beginning in the 1920s, two groups disagreed with mainstream Jewry. The American Council for Judaism (ACFJ), founded 1942, claims that Jews are neither a nationality nor a race, merely a religion—exactly the opposite position of the Nazis. The Jewish Communists, established in 1919, shared the goals of ACFJ, but only out of loyalty to the Soviet Union. Whitewashed over the years, these American Jewish communists hailed the 1929 Arab pogroms as the start of beginnings of the Arab revolution against British and Zionist imperialism. Extreme members of this group, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for selling the United States’ top-secret plans for building a nuclear bomb to the Soviet Union, would go to any lengths on behalf of “Mother Russia.” “Nothing,” thundered Dr. Wisse, “is more antithetical to Judaism than communism and its brutal use of tyranny to enforce its ideology.”
Space does not permit discussing all of the historical evolution of anti-Semitism and Jewish communism, so fast forward to the present. Then, as now, she faults Jews not for being victims, but for being like Avihu and not speaking out to unmask the left, which camouflages its anti-Semitism by trying to cast the present administration as dangerous anti-Semites of the right. Jews also are not forcefully protesting the United Nations’ anti-Zionism, which subsumed anti-Semitism. She pointed out that the Land of Israel had been under foreign occupation for more than 2,000 years, unparalleled in history.
As the Haggadah of Pesach annually reminds us, B’chol dor vador, omdim aleinu lechaloteinu, “In every generation, they arise to eviscerate us,” but the Almighty saves us from their hands. Prof. Wisse makes the point that the face—and the tactics—of the “they” who rise up against us change with the times, but their underlying hatred of Jews qua Jews remains a sad constant. Es iz schver tzu zein a yid (It is hard to be a Jew), she repeated, quoting the pained expression of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (1859–1916), better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem, often found in her 1979 reader, “The Best of Sholem Aleichem.” She edited that book with Irving Howe (1920–1993), a MacArthur fellow and Jewish American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America (!), best known for “World of our Fathers.”
Today, our enemies focus on efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, and that must be the focus of our counterpunching.
In the Q and A that followed, the audience seemed eager for practical techniques for successfully combating anti-Israel sentiments, especially on campus. Hopefully Prof. Wisse will expand the “how to” ideas advocated, for the need is clearly great.
No article can begin to do justice to Prof. Wisse, but in closing, I would be remiss not to mention her latest book, the much acclaimed “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (2013), which evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking—as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being—and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience. Always making us think, the book asks difficult but fascinating questions: Can the excessive and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor go too far and backfire in the process? Is “leave ‘em laughing” the wisest motto for a people that others have intended to sweep off the stage of history?
(Prof. Wisse has graciously agreed to make audio of her talk available online at http://bit.ly/WisseatRinat.)
By David E. Y. Sarna
David E. Y. Sarna is a writer and retired entrepreneur and a contributor to The Jewish Link. He has eight published books, including “History of Greed: Financial Fraud from Tulip Mania to Bernie Madoff,” “Evernote For Dummies,” Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications,” hundreds of articles, and has nearly completed his first novel about the Jewish treasures in the Vatican’s secret archive. He is hard at work on a book about the Internet of Things, and also on a book on the Talmud for general readers. He and his wife, Dr. Rachel Sarna, are long-time Teaneck residents.
