Essay
Despair Not!
Understanding and defeating the assault on Jewish moral self-confidence.
The Best of Ruth Wisse
Featured Content
By Ruth R. Wisse
The Jewish Literary Canon
Essay
My Quarrel with “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner”
How I came to translate one of the greatest Yiddish stories, a work that illuminates the central debate of Jewish modernity.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Episode 11·The Stories Jews Tell
The Shabbes Goy
I.L. Peretz's satire of self-defeating Jewish appeasement is as biting today as it was 130 years ago at publication.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Essay
The Sage and Scribe of Modern Israel
Haim Sabato infuses tradition into fiction as well as any Yiddish great—except he's unencumbered by modern angst.
By Ruth R. Wisse
"Know before whom you stand—that should be the political directive of the Jews."
Read the Wall Street Journal's recent feature on Ruth Wisse.
The Universities
Essay
Anti-Semitism Goes to School
Anti-Semitism on American college campuses is rising—and worsening. Where does it come from, and can it be stopped?
Episode 358·The Tikvah Podcast
Ruth Wisse on the Explosion of Anti-Israel Protests on Campus
How to understand the anti-Semitic mobs at Columbia, and universities around the country.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Observations
Reckoning; or, the Distressing Transformation of Harvard (and American Academia)
What I witnessed in my two decades of teaching at Harvard.
The American Jewish Intellectuals
Episode 439·The Tikvah Podcast
Remembering Norman Podhoretz
Paying tribute to a great defender of America, Israel, and the art of argument.
Lesson 7·The New York Intellectuals
Cynthia Ozick: Jewish Literary Maximalist
She persuasively condemned cultural envy, diaspora flattery, and trendy ideas antithetical to Judaism.
Essay
What Saul Bellow Saw
America's most decorated novelist spent his early years prodding the nation's soul. Then he became its guardian.
By Ruth R. WisseThe American Jewish Intellectuals part 2
Lesson 8·The New York Intellectuals: The First Generation
The Enigmatic Isaac Bashevis Singer
How to understand the preeminent Yiddish writer of the modern era, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.
Essay
Abraham Cahan: The Very Model of a New York Intellectual
The great newspaperman set an example of the kind of independent thinking the nation could sorely use today.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Lesson 4·The New York Intellectuals
How Irving Kristol Was Mugged By Reality
The former Communist sympathizer read and thought his way into becoming the preeminent neoconservative intellectual.
Lesson 6·The New York Intellectuals
Milton Himmelfarb's Assessment of American Jewry
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Himmelfarb was primarily interested in the Jews and Jewish issues. What did he see?
"Jews are not defined by others’ enmity but by their own God-inspired moral strength."
-Ruth Wisse
Jewish Politics and Power
Episode 77·The Tikvah Podcast
Ruth Wisse on the Perversity of Brilliance
How Hannah Arendt’s brilliance distorted her view of the Nazis—and Norman Podhoretz's sensational critique.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Observations
Why, Despite Good Intentions, Ken Burns’s “The U.S. and the Holocaust” Fails
How the documentary unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Episode 7·The Tikvah Podcast
On "Jews and Power"
Why generations of powerlessness corrupted the Jews, and how it affects Israel, America, and the Jewish people today.
Jewish Politics & Power Part II
Observations
Coming of Age Amid the Resurrection of Zion
The Gavriel Tirosh Affair and the costs of Jewish restraint.
Observations
How the Jews Remain an Eternal People
We Jews are the blue and white in the red, white, and blue.
Lesson 6·Daniel Deronda
Daniel Deronda: Jewish Nationalism
Decades before Herzl, George Eliot saw the need for Jews to recover their independence in their ancestral homeland.