The following program is pre-recorded.

Welcome to the Eric Matexas show with your host Eric Matexas.

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 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 see that narrative surely in

American life in the latter part of the 20th century 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, it was something quite different,

no less troubling but very different. People didn't want to fight and what surprised me most about

Harvard and 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,

there was always training of the best and the brightest young people during precisely the age

when you have to go into the arm, that's the age. So there was for 40 years, 40 years,

right? The faculty of Harvard kept ROTC off the campus, they did everything, they kept changing

the rationale for keeping it on campus, so it was not to allow it on campus, what is that about?

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