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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.

“This political environment could discourage congressional committee staff and federal agency personnel from pursuing investigations or enforcement actions involving antisemitism,” Karen Paikin Barall of the Brandeis Center told JNS.
“They get social credit within their political bases in terms of talking about settler violence and and taking up the side of the Palestinians on issues between them and Israel,” Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute told JNS.
“There is not, and there will not be, a Palestinian state,” the Israeli prime minister pledged. He also called for the corruption trial against him to be dropped.
The U.S. envoy also said antisemitism “didn’t exist” during his upbringing and warned of an unintended clash between Israel and Turkey.