We need more like Ruth Wisse in academia - opinion

• Published date: 28 September 2021
• Author: GIL TROY

Ruth Wisse's new memoir suggests it's not as bad as it seems… it's worse. If in 1978 John LeBoutillier wrote Harvard Hates America – Wisse's memoir could be titled "Harvard Hates the Truth – and the Jews."

At first glance, Wisse seems to be telling yet another rags-to-riches North American dream story, academic-style, from Holocaust to Harvard. Alas, seeing Harvard from the inside – and from the Right side of the ideological spectrum – she discovers an institution that has lost its way. This derailment, she argues, reflects an America that has lost its soul. She decides: "My story is worth telling not because of what I overcame, but because of what we all have yet to overcome."

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Born in 1936 in Czernowitz, Romania – now in Ukraine – she and her family fled Stalin as well as Hitler, making it to the New World, even as beloved relatives didn't make it at all. Blessed with the opportunities freedom brings, she studied literature, rubbing elbows with a galaxy of literary stars. She worked at summer camp with Leonard Cohen, kibitzed with Saul Bellow, gave Elie Wiesel a lift when he visited Montreal, squabbled with – then befriended – Cynthia Ozick, and had the aggressively-secular Isaac Bashevis Singer serve as the Cohen – the High Priest – at her oldest son's Pidyon HaBen, redeeming him as the first-born.

Along the way, Wisse helped launch an academic discipline she first doubted would get traction – studying Yiddish literature. In 1993, she truly made it, to a named chair at Harvard University, earning a National Humanities Medal in 2007.

Despite her sobering peek behind the Harvard curtains, Wisse's irrepressible personality makes the book uplifting. The clever title captures the pinch-me tone she often takes. Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation acknowledges that she – like most Jews today – is an anomaly in Jewish history, a lucky Jew. She evokes Montreal at its best, especially from the 1940s through 1960s, thriving as an immigrant, a McGill student, and a path-breaking professor helping to establish Jewish Studies as a discipline – with her specialization in Yiddish Literature. (We overlapped briefly at McGill, but I have been privileged to keep in touch with her sporadically since.)

Along the way, Wisse explains – especially to this skeptical Zionist reader – the joys of Yiddish. In her home...