Read about this Harvard professor emerita who is a small dynamo with Old World gentility.
Independent Women’s Forum is pleased to announce that Harvard professor emerita Ruth Wisse, eminent scholar and public intellectual, is the latest entry in our popular series of Champion Women profiles.
Currently a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, Professor Wisse recently delivered a stunning talk at the American Enterprise Institute on the rise of antisemitism in the United States. IWF wanted to ask her more about antisemitism. Is what we are seeing on American campuses a garden variety version of “the great hatred,” as antisemitism has been called, which has been with us throughout European history, or are there new elements to this outbreak of antisemitism?
Although Wisse’s family did not flee the Nazis—her prescient industrialist father realized early on that they would be doomed if he did not escape the Soviet invasion of Romania—she sketches a likely alternate history for herself, if she had remained in Europe, in her compelling new autobiography, “Free as a Jew, A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation”:
I was four years old when my parents engineered our escape from Europe, so I cannot pretend to have had a big hand in the matter. Had they not managed our flight in the summer of 1940, I would have remained a cute photograph in some Holocaust memorial museum. As we say in Yiddish, moykhl toyves—spare me those favors.
The world seems to have come full circle: Antisemitism is on the rise again and there is nobody better qualified to speak on this alarming development than Ruth Wisse.
We feel certain that you will find what Professor Wisse has to say on the meaning of this alarming, sobering, and necessary.
