The following program is pre-recorded.

Welcome to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas.

Hey there, folks.

Welcome back.

I'm talking to the author of a brand new memoir. It's called

Free as a Jew. Ruth Weiss, pronounced Weiss, but spelled W I-S-S-E. We're talking about many

important things. I want to talk to you about U-ish, Yiddish, Yiddish, Yiddish literature, and a lot of other fun stuff.

But I want to finish this conversation, at least this part of the conversation with you.

So is it the – I'm just guessing here.

It strikes me that the left in America has fallen in love with victimhood and that they don't like celebrating sometimes because it almost

implies well then we haven't suffered enough we want you to focus on our suffering as though

something's gained by that you're saying that's not how people learn it's not a good thing but

you you see that narrative surely in in american life life in the latter part of the 20th century.

It just kind of took over.

And people, they want to wallow.

They want to be victims.

They want to remind you of how much they've suffered because it gives them some kind of perverse status.

Well, that may be true of some people.

But, you know, what I saw when I was teaching at Harvard, actually, was something quite different, no less troubling, but very different. People didn't want to fight. And what surprised me most about Harvard in all the 21 years that I taught there,

I became involved in faculty meetings as I had never been before when I was at McGill.

And I saw that there was, they refused to let ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps,

that had always been at the basis of higher education,

...