Ruth Wisse: The Indispensable Happy Warrior

The famed scholar of Yiddish literature marvels at how much work there is yet to be done in the world of ideas and politics.

Ruth Wisse. Photo by Matt Craig, Harvard University

Ruth Wisse receives a reporter of the Sun in her sun-filled and book-lined Manhattan apartment and laments that the early spring is a “season of dying.” She is reflecting on the funeral of her friend Midge Decter, among other losses. Yet it soon becomes clear that she is nothing if not a happy warrior. 

Within an hour, the famed scholar of Yiddish literature is marveling at how much work there was yet to do in the world of ideas and politics that she has long bestrode. Fiery, eloquent, and uncompromising, Professor Wisse is indispensable.

Mrs. Wisse is the Martin Peretz professor of Yiddish literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University emerita and distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, as well as the author of such essential tracts as “The Modern Jewish Canon” and “Jews and Power.” She received the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and just recently released a memoir, “Free as a Jew.”

Over lemonade, Mrs. Wisse reflects first on the circumstances that have lately emerged at Harvard, where she taught for two decades. The school’s newspaper has endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, extending its “sincere support to those who have been and continue to be subject to violence in occupied Palestine.”  

Mrs. Wisse, one of the Jewish state’s warriors, sees this development as a symptom rather than a cause of a wider toxicity. She believes that merely responding to that editorial is “too retail” an approach for a reality where “Jews remain the no-fail target,” because they can be attacked with impunity. Small in number and outsized in influence, they are an inviting bullseye.     

Until those who stand by Israel learn to “take down” those who would do them harm, Mrs. Wisse maintains, there will be no price to pay for the malice that hunts them both on college quads and in the Middle East. Until hate against Israel and the Jews comes with a “cost,” it will continue. She urges a search for the most “effective yet usable” means of self-defense for a group with no instinct for aggression.  

Zooming out, she traces current campus transformations to the “revolution of the 1960s,” which was waged by communism against the founding principles of America. “The culture,” she believes, “was transformed.” 

Out of this admixture of communism and the sensibilities of the faculty lounge emerged a “culture of grievance” that exalted communism in America just as it was being discredited in the Soviet Union. It made particular inroads in minority communities, camouflaging rather than shedding its pursuit of power.

The excesses of McCarthyism, Mrs. Wisse avers, became “the excuse for never coming to terms with communism.” Opposition to the war in Vietnam became de facto support for the communist-backed North Vietnamese. Universities, which Marxism itself believed were most vulnerable to ideological capture, quickly fell.  

Even as reckonings were attempted with other noxious ideologies of the 20th century, the evils of communism were ignored and even sanitized, a blind spot that continues into the present. While not gainsaying that evil dapples the entire political spectrum, she sees the left as the repository of true danger.      

In contrast, for Mrs. Wisse, “America represents human progress,” and progressivism is in fact regressive in as much as it seeks to undo that work toward the good. Recognizing that intellectuals “love paradox,” she insists that this is actually an instance of “complete inversion.” 

Another example is Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism,” a book that has become academically canonical in her discipline of comparative literature that Mrs. Wisse views as tarring scholars like Bernard Lewis as the enemies rather than allies. By rewriting interest and curiosity as exploitation and usurpation, Said short-circuited entire pathways toward understanding.      

Rejecting Said and his intellectual heirs, Mrs. Wisse sees hostility to Israel as a proxy for a grander antipathy toward America. The Arab effort against Israel was a “marvelous outlet for aggression,” with the Palestinians becoming “poster children” for swapping self-critique for antisemitic projection. 

Turning from diagnosis to prescription, Mrs. Wisse views the current regime of affirmative action on university campuses as “group preferences” and “institutional racism,” a brand of “social engineering” that prevents minority communities from achieving widespread success by providing few with a gilded path while failing to address the root causes that keep many more in penury. 

Mrs. Wisse sees it as imperative to “defend the model of a nation” that she describes as “the family writ large,” and perceives in the fighters of Ukraine an example that mirrors Israel’s tenacious achievements and can provide a model for the West of what the spirit of patriotism can achieve. 

When it comes to the Jews, she notes the “correlation between the moral pressure brought to bear over Israel and the number of Jewish defectors” to the anti-Zionist camp. Surveying the contemporary American landscape, Mrs. Wisse reminds that “the more at home Jews are in America, the more America works.” For her, both Judaism and conservatism are “difficult disciplines” that are not conducive to dreams of purity, or “uniformity disguised as diversity.” 

At 86, Mrs. Wisse, indomitable as a thinker and cultural critic, is here to remind them, and us, of the cost of capitulating to the people and ideas who fight against “America as it is” in the name of far darker visions. 


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