Ruth Wisse on anti-Semitism, Jewish Politics, and Yiddish Literature

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2014

⏱️ 108 minutes

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Summary

Ruth Wisse is Research Professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Tikvah Fund. In this conversation, Kristol and Wisse discuss the politics of anti-Semitism, why Israel is under attack in our universities, and the study of Yiddish literature. Wisse explains the nature of modern anti-Semitism and why it is best understood as a political phenomenon. She also reflects on a lifetime of teaching Yiddish literature, and discusses why we should read its great works.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by Ruth Weiss,
0:20.0	a long time professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University and
0:24.8	master, mistress maybe, of all things Jewish, Israeli, Yiddish, and an American too, actually.
0:32.0	And Canadian, right? That's your actual origin, right? Not really my origin. But yes,
0:39.4	almost my origin. Now I'm intrigued. So why is it not really your origin?
0:43.2	Oh well I was born growing up in Montreal. In fact but I was born in Chernovitz
0:48.7	in which was then Romania and it's only when I immigrated to the United States
0:54.1	that I discovered that I had been born after all in the Ukraine.
0:57.0	Is that right? Yes because it's now part of the city is now part of Ukraine.
1:02.2	So international. That's good. I like that.
1:05.8	Well speaking of international we have so much to talk about and your incredibly
1:10.5	important work on the literature and and other topics but you've been
1:14.2	writing a lot recently about anti-Semitism a topic that I suppose you might have
1:18.7	hoped I might have hoped that we could have left behind a long time ago.
1:21.9	Indeed.
1:23.2	Why?
1:24.2	Are you very concerned and what's happened and what's new?
1:27.2	Tremendously.
1:28.2	I mean, you know, when I was growing up, I was pretty sure that the worst of history was behind us
1:36.3	and it's been a shock to realize that in fact anti-Semitism is something that not only did it not go away but in my
1:47.2	estimation it is much more virulent today than it ever was so I once wrote about it being the most successful ideology of the 20th century,
1:58.0	but I fear that it may be the most successful ideology of the 21st as well.
	...

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