Ruth R. Wisse
Author of The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture
About the Author
Ruth R. Wisse is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Image credit: Ruth Wisse receives the National Medal of the Arts, 2007. White House photo by Eric Draper.
Works by Ruth R. Wisse
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Wisse, Ruth R.
- Birthdate
- 1936-05-13
- Gender
- female
- Education
- McGill University (Ph.D., 1969)
Columbia University (M.A.) - Occupations
- Yiddish scholar
professor
literary scholar
translator - Organizations
- Harvard University (Martin Peretz Professor of Comparative Literature)
McGill University - Awards and honors
- National Humanities Medal (2007)
- Relationships
- Roskies, David G. (brother)
- Short biography
- Ruth R. Wisse was born to a Jewish family in Czernowitz, Romania (present-day Ukraine). Her father, a Lithuanian, had gone there to start a rubber factory. He received a medal from the king for his work, and this honor saved the family. They were allowed to leave the country as the Russians advanced in 1940, going to Lisbon as so-called stateless persons. From there they went to Montreal, Canada.
The family spoke Yiddish at home, and Prof. Wisse considers herself a product of the thousand-year-old Yiddish culture that spread from Europe to America in the 19th century. She earned her MA from Columbia University, and her PhD in literature from McGill University in 1969. When she wanted to study Yiddish literature in the late 1950s, there were few choices. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the
"Shlemiel as Hero in Yiddish and American Fiction," which was published in 1971 as her first book.
As a teaching fellow at McGill, she was able to start teaching Yiddish writers. Bit by bit, the classes she introduced led to a curriculum and eventually helped found a Jewish Studies Department. Her book The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (2000), considered her masterpiece, presents decades of scholarship to the general reader and makes the case for the centrality of Yiddish literature to any understanding of the modern Jewish experience. In addition to her own books, she has edited several anthologies and translated the works of I.L. Peretz and Chaim Grade into English. - Nationality
- Romania (birth)
USA (residence) - Birthplace
- Czernowitz, Romania
- Places of residence
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Members
Reviews
Jews have spent more time weak and dispersed than sovereign in their homeland. To survive, Wisse argues, they found strength in adversity. But strength that can’t offer security is pitiable. Worse yet, Wisse observes, it misfitted them for renewed sovereignty. Jews imagined that all would appreciate in the State of Israel what they developed through terrible hardship: an accommodating spirit and a need for everyone in the group to thrive. Accommodation, it turns out, looks like weakness, show more and many nations don’t want what’s best for their people and resent the example. Wisse’s book is a tightly argued case against naivety, against the belief that the power learned in powerlessness can substitute for real politics. show less
I will begin by admitting that I am somewhat in love with Ruth Wisse… As an economist I couldn’t care less, but as a Jewish theorist and Yiddishist? Inject her into my veins please. I spent my last class on Yiddish literature in college defending her opinions on the role the language has in the modern world, taking much scorn by my classmates but happily becoming some kind of underground Zionist leader for those last few weeks of college. Try as you might, you can’t intimidate your show more fellow student’s into silence forever…
Anyways, this is a situation where her ideas are not organized well for a book. It felt like I was reading her notes after a bad dream. I don’t agree with her on everything, but you can’t not love someone who sticks to their guns so passionately about something you believe in. She’s a polemic and she knows it.
Not gonna lie, I’d pay a lot for a Finklestein vs. Wisse debate. It’d be fucking INSANE!!! show less
Anyways, this is a situation where her ideas are not organized well for a book. It felt like I was reading her notes after a bad dream. I don’t agree with her on everything, but you can’t not love someone who sticks to their guns so passionately about something you believe in. She’s a polemic and she knows it.
Not gonna lie, I’d pay a lot for a Finklestein vs. Wisse debate. It’d be fucking INSANE!!! show less
I have enjoyed reading articles by Ruth Wisse over the years, so when I saw she had a book out on Jewish humor, I had to get it.
While this book does indeed contain some very funny jokes, the purpose of the book is to explore the origins of Jewish humor and its differences over time and geographical distribution. As she summarizes:
“I have tried to show that Jews joke differently in Yiddish than in English, differently among themselves than in the presence of non-Jews, and differently in show more constitutional democracies than in totalitarian states.”
Most of the book focuses on the Yiddish humor of pre-Holocaust Europe. She talks about how Jews “sublimated their anxieties in joking” with Sholem Aleichem leading the way:
“Almost single-handedly, he invented a Jewish people that laughed its way through crisis...”
She writes that by 1975, an estimated three-quarters of U.S. comedy professionals were Jewish, crediting the tradition created in the Catskills as the most important factor in the professionalization of Jewish humor in the United States. In its heyday, she reports, one could find over six hundred shows on a typical Saturday night!
She also mentions the way in which Jewish entertainment served as “a quasisynagogue - a spiritual sanctuary and cultural gathering place” almost to make up, she avers, for the ceremonial occasions that the audience no longer observed at home.
She offers a look at Jewish humor in Israel, which is quite different than it is in the West, for the obvious reasons of Israel’s provenance, location, ongoing dangers, and different nature of political problems. She observes:
“...as the crowing of roosters and barking of dogs are transcribed variously in every alphabet, Jewish humor changes with language and circumstance.”
Finally, she tackles the subject of Holocaust humor, illustrating with a schtick from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about the competitive suffering of a Holocaust survivor and a runner-up from the television reality show “Survivor.”
Evaluation: This is not a “joke book” like, say, The Joys of Yiddish, but rather a survey of Jewish humor and the factors contributing to its endurance and evolution. Nevertheless, it contains quite a few funny stories, and is quite entertaining. show less
While this book does indeed contain some very funny jokes, the purpose of the book is to explore the origins of Jewish humor and its differences over time and geographical distribution. As she summarizes:
“I have tried to show that Jews joke differently in Yiddish than in English, differently among themselves than in the presence of non-Jews, and differently in show more constitutional democracies than in totalitarian states.”
Most of the book focuses on the Yiddish humor of pre-Holocaust Europe. She talks about how Jews “sublimated their anxieties in joking” with Sholem Aleichem leading the way:
“Almost single-handedly, he invented a Jewish people that laughed its way through crisis...”
She writes that by 1975, an estimated three-quarters of U.S. comedy professionals were Jewish, crediting the tradition created in the Catskills as the most important factor in the professionalization of Jewish humor in the United States. In its heyday, she reports, one could find over six hundred shows on a typical Saturday night!
She also mentions the way in which Jewish entertainment served as “a quasisynagogue - a spiritual sanctuary and cultural gathering place” almost to make up, she avers, for the ceremonial occasions that the audience no longer observed at home.
She offers a look at Jewish humor in Israel, which is quite different than it is in the West, for the obvious reasons of Israel’s provenance, location, ongoing dangers, and different nature of political problems. She observes:
“...as the crowing of roosters and barking of dogs are transcribed variously in every alphabet, Jewish humor changes with language and circumstance.”
Finally, she tackles the subject of Holocaust humor, illustrating with a schtick from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about the competitive suffering of a Holocaust survivor and a runner-up from the television reality show “Survivor.”
Evaluation: This is not a “joke book” like, say, The Joys of Yiddish, but rather a survey of Jewish humor and the factors contributing to its endurance and evolution. Nevertheless, it contains quite a few funny stories, and is quite entertaining. show less
As always, my quibbles first. The intro and epilogue are fictional letters by the author to a fictional relative in Israel. And one more quibble, not with the book but the likely audience, is that the book is basically "preaching to the choir." In other words, the bulk of the readers are not going to be the politically liberal Jewish people to whom this book is directed.
This work is a well-written, pointed statement about the failure of Jews to stand up for their own interests. The Jews show more typically side with their enemies. This echoes the pathetic history of the Jews' alliance with the Communist movement in Russia during the early 1900's. This echoes the pathetic history of the Jews in fanatically supporting the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was perfectly happy to watch the Jews walk the gangplank from the ship the St. Louis, in many cases indirectly into the Eisensatzgrupen and the gas chambers.
Ruth Wisse traces the path of Jewish short story writers in Israel who impugn the moral credentials of the efforts of the State of Israel to defend itself and fail to even note the vicious primitivism of their enemies.
The book makes a lot of points that need making; too bad they will fall on ears that thoroughly agree with her. show less
This work is a well-written, pointed statement about the failure of Jews to stand up for their own interests. The Jews show more typically side with their enemies. This echoes the pathetic history of the Jews' alliance with the Communist movement in Russia during the early 1900's. This echoes the pathetic history of the Jews in fanatically supporting the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was perfectly happy to watch the Jews walk the gangplank from the ship the St. Louis, in many cases indirectly into the Eisensatzgrupen and the gas chambers.
Ruth Wisse traces the path of Jewish short story writers in Israel who impugn the moral credentials of the efforts of the State of Israel to defend itself and fail to even note the vicious primitivism of their enemies.
The book makes a lot of points that need making; too bad they will fall on ears that thoroughly agree with her. show less
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- Works
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- Rating
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- ISBNs
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