Ruth Wisse

"Most of all," according to a May 2014 profile in The Forward, Wisse has been "one of the most forceful conservative voices in support of Israel, arguing that criticism of the state repeats ingrained habits of Jewish accommodationism and self-blame." She sees no moral equivalence between the Arab and Israeli sides in the Middle Eastern conflict:

Wisse has taught at McGill, Stanford, New York, Hebrew and Tel Aviv universities. While teaching at McGill she developed a "pioneering" graduate program in Jewish studies". She left McGill to teach at Harvard in January 1993.

Wisse has published notable books and essays on contemporary Jewish history, including If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992) and Jews and Power (2008).

According to one critic, Wisse's work has been characterized "by the sharpness of her insight, by her unwillingness to retreat from a skirmish and by the inability of even those who disagree with her to deny her brilliance." She won the 1988 Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature. She received one of the 2007 National Humanities Medals. The award cited her for "scholarship and teaching that have illuminated Jewish literary traditions. Her insightful writings have enriched our understanding of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture in the modern world."

Wisse was born into a Jewish family in Czernowitz in what is today Ukraine, but was then part of Romania. She grew up in Montreal, Canada and earned her MA from Columbia University, and in 1969 her PhD from McGill University. She is the sister of David Roskies, professor of Yiddish and Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Wisse, whose doctorate was in literature, is described by literary scholar Edward Alexander as one of a group of scholars who earned PhDs in English literature in the 1960s, but moved into Jewish Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, applying the modern critical methods of literary scholarship to Yiddish and Hebrew texts. Wisse describes Saul Bellow as her favorite English-language novelist.

Ruth Wisse (surname pronounced /waɪs/) (Yiddish: רות װײַס; née Roskies; born May 13, 1936) is a Canadian academic and is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita. She is a noted scholar of Yiddish literature and of Jewish history and culture.