Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas. I'm your host, Eric Cohen.

I'm very pleased to be joined today by my friend, Professor Ruth Weiss, one of America's most

distinguished teachers and scholars of Yiddish and Jewish

literature in America. She was for a long time a professor at Harvard University, and now I'm

very honored to say distinguishing your fellow with the Tikva Fund. She's also a prolific

writer of essays and op-eds of scholarly books and polemical books on various topics, Jews

and liberalism, humor, Jews in

Power, the modern Jewish canon. Ruth, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks. I'm enjoying

this. So our topic today is your essay called Antisemitism Goes to School, which was published

about a year ago in Mosaic, which is an effort to really

describe, understand, and analyze the new anti-Semitism that's re-emerged on the American

College and University scene, and to assess what we can do about it. So let's start, if we could,

just by understanding the lay of the land. What does this resurgence of anti-Semitism look like today?

What is happening on the ground? And you think we're living in a new moment?

Well, I've been thinking about anti-Semitism for a very long time, and I've been on the university campus for a very long time.

All my life practically from the time I entered university myself.

And we are definitely living in a different time because things in relation to Jews and the war

against the Jews or aggression against the Jews has changed tremendously. Thinking about it,

I remember that when I started to teach at McGill in the late 60s and early 70s, when we set up a

Jewish studies program, one of my friends, who was a professor of Hebrew, decided to take a course

in Arabic and talked a friend of his to going with him. And as a professor of Hebrew decided to take a course in Arabic and talked a friend

of his to going with him. And as a matter of fact, there was a very good program of Islamic

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