Hi Bill Crystal here. I'm very pleased to introduce a conversation I had back in 2014 in the first year of these conversations with Ruth Weiss.

Ruth taught for many years at Harvard University. She's a very distinguished scholar of Jewish history and

British literature. The topic of the conversation was anti-Semitism. It stands up awfully

well today and I really do think it sheds an awful lot of light on the current

challenges and circumstances we face. Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by Ruth Weiss,

a long-time professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Master, or Mistress, maybe, of all things Jewish. of That's your actual origin, right?

Not really my origin.

But, yes, almost my origin.

Now I'm intrigued.

So why is it not really your origin?

Oh, well, I was born in Montreal.

In fact, but I was born in Chernovitz, which was then Romania.

And it's only when I immigrated to the United States that I discovered that I had been born after all in the Ukraine.

Is that right? Yes, because it's now part of, the city is now part of Ukraine.

So, international.

That's good. I like that. Well, speaking of international. International.

That's good.

I like that. Well, speaking of international, we have so much to talk about and your incredibly important work

on the English literature and other topics, but you've been writing a lot recently about anti-Semitism a topic that I suppose you might have hoped I might have hoped that we could have left behind a long time ago.

Indeed. Why? What are you very concerned and what's happened and what's new?

Tremendously.

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