Ruth Wisse Challenges Americans to Live American, Jewish and Zionist Values

On March 25, Professor Ruth Wisse, the legendary Yiddish literature and Jewish culture scholar, used an all-American platform to inspire Americans with Jewish, Zionist and quintessentially American, lessons: Champion your identity – while defending it, and yourself! Wisse contrasted America’s current transmission troubles, with the enduring “Jewish message” of “endurance.” Americans must affirm our values by telling our story to the next generation – while being vigilant against our enemies.

The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities is the federal government’s highest honor “for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Choosing an Eastern-European-born Yiddishist, who built her career at Montreal’s McGill University …  sounds crazy, no? One could justify the decision by credentialing – two decades at Harvard, pathbreaking books, Wall Street Journal op-eds celebrating America. More important, simply watching or reading “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White, and Blue’” – hailing identity, continuity, democracy – thoroughly justifies the honor.

Wisse praised her adopted country, while affirming: “The more I cherish all the good that it does, the less I understand those who take it for granted. This makes me increasingly protective of what can only remain the land of the free if we are determined to conserve it.” Seconds into this tour-de-force, the crowd could have risen, shouted “Dayenu,” that’s enough, and gone home enlightened.  That timely message anticipating America’s 250th, resonates particularly now as America and Israel fight a justified war that too many Americans refuse to appreciate as countering a Jihadist regime threatening them.

Ruth – a cherished mentor and dear friend – delivered the lecture in Washington, DC. I read the transcript the next morning in Jerusalem, having awoken –  again – to sirens.

Part one demonstrates Wisse’s academic chops as a lyrical, insightful interpreter of text, bringing Yiddish alive. Imagine standing before a packed Trump Kennedy Center crowd, enjoying the highest of American honors. Within minutes, Wisse recites a Yiddish poem by Abraham Sutzkever.  Born in Polish Lithuania in 1913, he lost dear relatives in the Holocaust, fought as a Partisan, reached Moscow, then Israel – and testified at the Nuremberg Trial “on behalf of Jewry,” standing, refusing to sit and normalize the atrocities he recounted.

Through Sutzkever, Wisse evoked the rich Yiddish-speaking, Jewish civilization she’s helped generations of students discover, while celebrating Jews’ forever-resilience and the post-Hitler Zionist resurrection. Navigating those broad, often brutal, historical forces, Wisse the literature prof decodes this devastated poet’s images of permanence.  “Who will last? And What?” he wonders, mentioning a “blind man’s blindness,” the sea’s “thread of foam,” and “a bit of cloud snarled in a tree.”

As I read Wisse’s emphasis on the world’s ethereal yet eternal power, in the Jews’ eternal capital, thunder crashed. My first thought, using Israelis’ filter for everything these days, was “oh-oh, if it’s pouring like this in Jerusalem, it must be miserable for our kids fighting up north” (and most personally for my son-in-law there). Then stretching, trying to be a good Zionist, I thought, “oops, yes, of course, rain blesses our parched promised land …”

Wisse’s rhetorical magic drew me back. “For Sutzkever,” she teaches, “poetry is the death-defying power that resists” tragedy, reflecting people’s “transformative power … over circumstance.” Then, dismayed by America’s growing godlessness and nihilism, she reads Sutzkever’s conclusion, finding reassurance from “the heavens.” His examples pushes “past Holocaust memorials and cemeteries,” seeking “the source of regeneration.” Wisse insists: “Trust in eternity can be sought only in the eternal.”

As a great lecturer, Wisse breaks the tension by going “Tinker Bell,” saying: “like the good fairy in many a folktale, I bring this as the first message of endurance.” It’s on the dollar bill: “May God in Whom We Trust become the true coin of this realm.”

Defying today’s Jew-hating epidemic, refuting those mourning the end of American Jewry’s “golden age” – America’s 52nd Jefferson Lecturer read Judaism’s most foundational prayer, the “Shema” – “Hear o Israel.” Generously recalling reciting the Lord’s Prayer in her Canadian high school – “and I am the better for it” – Wisse underscores the human need to follow “a strong, God-inspired moral path.”  But fearing an America approaching its 250th anniversary buffeted by partisan debates demeaning and cheapening American history, she bridges from faith to education. The one-line prayer’s “substance is brief while the instructions are lengthy and intricate” – to “Teach them to your children,” to “speak of them” at home and “outdoors,” from morning till night, and even hang them as proud, outward signs on your “doorposts.”

In short, you need literacy to spawn constructive, democratic pride.

This affirmative, eternal message, cultivating generations of thoughtful patriots, clashed with the “accent of grievance over gratitude” Wisse witnessed at Harvard. Sometimes she felt like shouting at faculty meetings: “What are we doing to reinforce the most successful government system ever crafted by so few for so many? Let’s remember that our republic depends for its perpetuation on teachers who instill its God-inspired history and tenets diligently, patiently, and persuasively …”

Instead, academics – and their gullible students – traded “Marx for Madison, Lenin for Lincoln and, lately, the Islamist incursion for the American Revolution.”

Thus, Wisse’s second message. Democracy must raise citizens to “respect and confidently to perpetuate their precious inheritance.”

Finally, as American tankers refuel Israeli jets mid-air, as Israelis fight this war in English with clocks set to the American military’s Greenwich time, Wisse harmonizes America and Israel, Americanism and Zionism.

This American greenhorn captures The Federalist Papers’ genius, highlighting “their sobriety,” and “the conservative approach to doing no harm rather than undertaking to ‘repair the world.” And, defying most Woke-blinded historians today, Wisse recognizes that the “core argument for federation was built on the need for a common defense, with armed forced being the guarantor of a sustainable union.”

Regretting that many founding Zionists remained addicted to the Jewish exile’s “politics of accommodation,” Wisse says Israelis learned they “had to pick up their sword and shield … if there was to be any hope of waging war no more.”

Today, America must learn from Israel, whose “moral confidence is manifest in its defense.”

Israel is small. Only America has “the power to enforce its moral authority over those who elsewhere rule by threat.” Then another gem: “How much brighter the world becomes when liberty’s standard-bearer is equally determined to ensure that our civilization survives.”

Wisse’s formula for endurance emerges. Souls reflect faith in God. Spines express democratic pride. And we bear arms when necessary, while being vigilant always. “This is our country, sweet land of liberty, and of thee we do not sing enough,” she rhapsodizes.

Validating the National Endowment for the Humanities’ mission to transcend today’s vulgarians, she concluded: “instilling intellectual and moral confidence in our civilization rests with the humanities.” And returning to Sutzkever’s – and the Jews’ –secret of survival, she anticipated America reaching “its 2,500th anniversary,” if we all “acknowledge before whom we stand.” Then, fusing Abraham and Sarah with Abraham Lincoln, and implicitly encouraging the American-Israeli fight for Iranian freedom, Wisse urges: “May these messages from the Blue and White forever help to strengthen and to secure the Red, White, and Blue.”

Ruth Wisse posed the challenge. America’s citizens have to answer: Are today’s Americans ready to learn the lessons of Jewish history – and of American history too?

Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest E-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, was just published and can be downloaded on the website of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute.