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Noted Yiddish scholar to deliver NEH lecture

Ruth Wisse intends to discuss the “blue and white” within the “red, white and blue.”

Ruth Wisse
Ruth Wisse, Harvard University professor emerita of Yiddish literature and comparative literature, speaks at the Tikvah Fund Jewish Leadership Conference in New York City on Dec. 8, 2024. Photo by Sean T. Smith/Simon Luethi via Tikvah Fund.

Ruth Wisse, Yiddish literature professor emerita at Harvard University and a distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, is scheduled to deliver the 52nd Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on March 25 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the National Endowment for the Humanities said.

The federal agency said that the talk “is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Her talk will be titled “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White and Blue.’”

It will address “the deep connections between Jewish culture and ideas and the founding and growth of the United States and speak to the lessons that 2,500 years of Jewish experience hold for the next millennium of American progress,” per the NEH.

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