Ruth Wisse

Ruth Wisse, a pioneering scholar in Jewish studies, is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. She is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. A unique figure in the world of American Jewish letters, she bridges the worlds of Yiddish and American culture, of literature and politics, of Israel and the Diaspora.

Born in Romania, Wisse immigrated to Canada in 1940 and grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home in Montreal. She attended the Jewish People’s School before earning her bachelor's degree at McGill University. Encouraged by Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, she pursued a master's at Columbia University. She later returned to McGill for her doctorate, and began teaching Yiddish Literature there in 1968, helping to develop its Jewish studies department. In 1993, she moved to Harvard, where she taught until her retirement in 2014.

Her books on literary topics include "A Little Love in Big Manhattan," "The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture," an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir "The Glatstein Chronicles," and "No Joke: Making Jewish Humor." She has also edited or co-edited several anthologies of Jewish literature and is the author of two political studies, "If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews" and "Jews and Power." Her memoir, "Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self- Liberation" was published in 2021.

Wisse lectures widely, and her writing on everything from Jewish culture to Zionism to contemporary politics has been published in Mosaic, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Jewish Review of Books, National Affairs, and Tablet.