More in ‘Ruth Wisse’

• The five U.S. congressmen in J Street’s Mideast delegation were “puzzled” by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s refusal to meet with them, and his labeling J Street as not “pro-Israeli”. (But why would they expect a diplomat to have good people skills?) [Haaretz]
• The Israeli government launched a new P.R. campaign designed to empower ...

“What instruments we have agree/The day of his death was a dark cold day”: W.H. Auden wrote that about W.B. Yeats, but we tend to think it true of most poets, and Avrom Sutzkever, the 20th Century’s greatest Yiddish poet, seems no exception. Born in modern-day Belarus Smorgon, a shtetl located in what is now ...

To coincide with the release of Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, Tablet asked a host of Jewish journalists, academics and pundits to offer their thoughts on American Jews’ historical tendency to cast their votes toward the left side of the political spectrum. Coming as it does after a presidential election, Podhoretz’s question ...

Ruth R. Wisse
It may seem that there are two Ruth Wisses. One, the eminent Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, is the author of The Shlemiel as a Modern Hero, and the editor of some half-dozen anthologies of Yiddish prose and poetry, much of which she has translated herself. The other, a political ...