Ruth Wisse on the Stories Jews Tell

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2022

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

By reading literature, one can experience what it’s like to be, say, a king, or a soldier, or a mother, or a stranger, or a tyrant, or for that matter a slave, not to mention far more.

What of modern Jewish literature? How did its story-tellers speak not only to individual readers, but also to a nation—a nation which until recently was dispersed through many lands and spoke to itself in many languages? How did fiction become one of the primary ways that modern Jewish culture was created and conveyed? And how have the greatest Jewish writers confronted the Jewish people's enduring dilemmas?

Those are some of the questions that Ruth Wisse, professor emerita at Harvard, Mosaic columnist, and senior distinguished fellow at the Tikvah Fund, asks of herself and her students in her courses on Jewish literature. And they animate her new podcast series "The Stories Jews Tell." On this week's podcast, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, she orients listeners to the questions of Jewish literature.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why do we read fiction? Why is it taught in schools? Why do our teachers think it will help us live better lives?
0:14.7	Why do wisdom-seeking adults use precious leisure to read literature and poetry?
0:21.2	Literature, it seems to me, can nurture the reader's inner life
0:25.1	by reflecting back to us the emotions and impulses and ambitions
0:30.2	that otherwise would be hard to detect in ourselves, or name, or explain.
0:36.2	Through the faculty of sympathy, of imagining ourselves in the role of another,
0:40.7	we can come to widen our own moral imagination and experience what it's like to be a tyrant,
0:47.7	a king, a soldier, a mother, a stranger, a slave, to experience what it would be like to feel the depth of remorse that
0:56.7	a murderer might feel, or to lose oneself in a mania of romantic longing. Literature allows us
1:03.7	to span the arc of a life or trace the threat of generations. It is a nursery of emotional
1:10.1	wisdom and prudence and inspiration.
1:13.2	That's what reading stories, told by the master storytellers, can offer to a reader.
1:18.9	But what about a Jewish reader in search of Jewish wisdom? How does a writer speak to a nation?
1:25.8	A nation, moreover, that speaks to itself in multiple languages.
1:31.0	How did it come to be that fiction became one of the main ways that modern Jewish culture
1:36.4	was created and conveyed? Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. Those are
1:43.1	some of the questions that Ruth Weiss,
1:45.9	Professor Emerita at Harvard, Mosaic columnist, and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the
1:51.7	Tikva Fund, would ask of herself and her students in her courses over the years. And there
1:57.5	in the background of a new podcast series that she'll be launching next month,
2:02.6	The Stories Jews Tell.
2:04.8	Today, she joins me for an orientation to the questions of Jewish literature.
	...

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