Ruth Wisse
And the professors attack the mob’s targets.
The renowned expert on Yiddish literature stops by to talk everything Tevye, Fiddler, Sholem Aleichem, and more.
A simple protagonist and a very, very complicated people.
Lost and found.
In a new lecture series, a master teacher shows the enduring relevance of the great 19th-century novelist’s Daniel Deronda.
It belonged to the family of two distinguished Yiddish scholars.
Like anti-Semitism targets the Jews, the war against America’s “one percent” blames intractable political and economic problems on an entire collectivity.
Ruth Wisse isn’t asking Jews to stop joking; but more than humor, she knows, is required to fend off their (dead-serious) enemies.
“I applaud the intellectual courage of [Ruth Wisse's No Joke], the breadth of her learning, the comprehensiveness of her ambitions, her unembarrassed declarations of pleasure. . .