Ruth Wisse Delivers the Address of a Lifetime

The delivery of the 52nd Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Trump Kennedy Center by the scholar of Yiddish, Ruth Wisse, doubled as a celebration of America and the Jews by a sage whose teaching and writing has championed the Eternal People and the City on the Hill. The lecture is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. President Jefferson, meet Professor Wisse.Mrs. Wisse, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita, is no stranger to high honors, having received the 2007 National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. At 89, she is among the oldest ever deliverer of the Jefferson Lecture — but nobody, she added, “has been more grateful.” Previous honorees have included Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Sidney Hook.None of those figures gathered a crowd as passionately devoted to the thriving of Israel and America as did Mrs. Wisse. Rabbi David Wolpe delivered an introduction where he praised the professor, who was born at Czernowitz, as someone who “speaks for a world that is lost to remind us of all we have to lose.” Mrs. Wisse in turn addressed her speech to “all my fellow lovers of America out there.” Her remarks were keyed to the nation’s 250th anniversary.Mrs. Wisse’s theme was “staying power,” or what resources of the spirit and soul can not only make America great, but keep it so. For that wisdom she turned to the more than 3,000 years of Jewish experience, and one poem in particular, from the Yiddish master Avrom Sutzkever. “Ver Vet Blaybn?,” or “Who Will Last? / And What Will Last?” The poet answers that what remains will be only a star in a tear, a blind man’s blindness, and the Almighty.Mrs. Wisse intoned “May God in Whom we trust be the true coin of the realm.” She then dilated on how a democratic sensibility can be inculcated — “not biologically,” she insisted. She recalled her growing indignation at Harvard faculty meetings where “Marx replaced Madison and Lenin replaced Lincoln.” At Columbia University, Trilling was in turn succeeded by Edward Said, whom Mrs. Wisse calls the “patron saint of the encampments.”The lecture then unfolded a comparative study of the foundations of America and Israel. Mrs. Wisse expressed her awe at the Federalist Papers and marveled at the attention they pay to defense of the nation as a core component of constitutionalism. Against those who lament that the Jewish state has no constitution, she expressed relief that such a founding parchment was not composed in the war-torn and anxiety-filled early days of the Jewish state.Mrs. Wisse lauded the Israel Defense Forces as the nation’s “beating heart,” and dates its triumphs to Israel’s earliest moments, when Jerusalem won what she calls the “most asymmetric war in history” against Arab armies who sought to eradicate the state, just as Islamist forces do today. Turning to the present, she argued that the world is “brighter” when America fights alongside Israel. That spirit, Mrs. Wisse concluded, will see America to its 2,500 birthday.

Ruth Wisse Delivers the Address of a Lifetime

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