Response ·
Raising Jewish Children with Eyes Wide Open
By Ruth R. WisseAn antidote to despair.
Ruth R. Wisse
Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.
Latest Content
Monthly Essay ·
Despair Not!
By Ruth R. WisseUnderstanding and defeating the assault on Jewish moral self-confidence.
Response ·
How Jewish Studies Became a Tool of Adversarial Culture
By Ruth R. WisseRather than highlighting Jewish contribution, the field now aims to show Jews as victims, socialists, aberrant, or “queer.”
Observation ·
How the Jews Remain an Eternal People
By Ruth R. WisseWe Jews are the blue and white in the red, white, and blue.
Response ·
To Do Better in Our Time, We Must Learn What Abraham Cahan Accomplished in His
By Ruth R. WisseYiddish socialist or proto-neoconservative?
Monthly Essay ·
The Very Model of a New York Intellectual
By Ruth R. WisseAbraham Cahan was one of America's first great Jewish newspapermen, and set an example of independent thinking that the nation could sorely use today.
Observation ·
The Best Books of 2023, Part I
By Elliott Abrams, Cynthia Ozick, Neil Rogachevsky, Ruth R. WisseFeaturing prime ministers, kidnappings, popes, silences, exiled shadows, portraits, intellectual origins, the best minds, and more.
Observation ·
The Logic of Jewish History
By Ruth R. WisseLacking freedom, Jews once developed an ethic of martyrdom. Now, they don’t need martyrs, they need to stand and fight.
Monthly Essay ·
I.L. Peretz and the Golden Chain
By Ruth R. WisseThe great Yiddish writer envisioned an unbroken transmission of Jewishness through the generations, from biblical prophets to talmudic sages to literary giants like Heine—and himself.
Observation ·
The Biden Administration’s Anti-Semitism Blindspot
By Ruth R. WisseWill the administration’s new strategy to counter anti-Semitism camouflage its own inaction?
Monthly Essay ·
The Sage and Scribe of Modern Israel
By Ruth R. WisseThe novelist and rabbi Haim Sabato infuses tradition into fiction as well as any of the Yiddish greats. The difference? His work is unencumbered by modern angst.
Observation ·
The Asian American Challenge to Affirmative Action—and to American Jews
By Ruth R. WisseWhy haven't more American Jews joined the many Asian-American students and their parents protesting a policy reminiscent of the 1920s?
Observation ·
Why, Despite Good Intentions, Ken Burns’s “The U.S. and the Holocaust” Fails
By Ruth R. WisseFocusing on America’s failures to save more Jews in the Holocaust unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today. Here's how.
Observation ·
What Can American Jews Do?
By Ruth R. WisseThe direct target of anti-Jewish politics may be the Jews, but the more consequential damage is to the land of Lincoln. What can Jews do to help?
Observation ·
Is the Writing on the Wall for America’s Jews?
By Ruth R. WisseSmiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on to Jews around us? But it's our responsibility to stay.
Observation ·
The Intensity of the Abortion Debate Is a Sign of America’s Vitality
By Ruth R. WisseThat America still so passionately debates abortion marks the difference between the stagnation of Europe and the hopeful civilization of the United States.
Observation ·
American Jewry’s Stunted Sons
By Ruth R. WisseThe middle of the 20th century inaugurated a time when American Jewish sons stopped being able to imagine themselves as Jewish fathers—and we're still living in it.
Observation ·
Johanna Kaplan’s Serious American Jewish Comedy
By Ruth R. WisseThe characters in her new story collection are fully formed creatures of that transitional 20th-century moment between European Jewish survivors and American forgetters.
Observation ·
What the Children of American Jewish Communists Needed, and What They Owe
By Ruth R. WisseThe children of Jewish Communists needed a therapeutic process to work through the effects of growing up in a political cult. They didn't get it.
Observation ·
The Best Books of 2021, Chosen by Mosaic Authors (Part I)
By Elliott Abrams, Richard Goldberg, Neil Rogachevsky, Jonathan Silver, Ruth R. WisseFive of our writers pick several favorites each, featuring a duke's children, Jewish treasures, zealots and emancipators, revolts, dual allegiances, spies, and more.
Observation ·
Canaries in the Coal Mine: Dara Horn and Bari Weiss
By Ruth R. WisseJews can do their fellow citizens a favor by identifying the sources of cultural poison before the toxicity turns fatal. Hardly anybody is doing it better than these two.
Observation ·
“All the World Wants the Jews Dead: An Overwrought View from the Peak at the Bottom”
By Ruth R. WisseBefore Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews, and before Bari Weiss's "Everybody Hates the Jews," there was Cynthia Ozick's still powerful and urgent essay in Esquire.
Observation ·
The Crackpot Ideas of Yiddish Fiction’s Most Improbable Scenarios Become Real
By Ruth R. WisseS. Ansky's radical yeshiva boys used to seem unreal. But observing today's political scene has taught me to understand them.
Observation ·
A Threat Assessment for American Jewry, Part Two
By Ruth R. WisseParts of the Jewish people stand up to the barrage of anti-Semitism, but others do not. Those others are part of the threat.
Observation ·
A Threat Assessment for American Jewry, Part One
By Ruth R. WisseWhich of the recent samples of anti-Semitism—on the street, on campus, in Congress, or in the clergy—is the greatest threat to America and the Jews?
Observation ·
Two Favorite Poems, and How they Define Israel and America
By Ruth R. Wisse"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus and "The Silver Platter" by Natan Alterman distill, reinforce, and hallow what makes each nation distinctive.
Observation ·
The Hounding of Noam Pianko
By Ruth R. WisseThe latest drama in the field of Jewish studies has turned into a campaign to reframe the perpetuation of Jewishness as a dystopian project of enforced reproduction.
Observation ·
How Herzl’s Wardrobe Galvanized the Jews
By Ruth R. WisseBack in my teens, when I began reading and thinking about Zionism, I thought the founder of the movement was a snob. I was dead wrong.
Observation ·
The Best Books of 2020, Chosen by Mosaic Authors (Part II)
By Haviv Rettig Gur, Ed Husain, Martin Kramer, Robert W. Nicholson, Ruth R. Wisse, David WolpeFive more of our regular writers pick several favorites each, featuring what Jews are for, magicians, assassins, call signs, chaos, separated siblings, and more.
Observation ·
A Tribute to Mosaic’s Founding Editor
By Eric Cohen, Ruth R. Wisse, Martin Kramer, Hillel Halkin, Rabbi Meir SoloveichikSome of Mosaic's regular writers reflect on Neal Kozodoy and his accomplishments.
