Ruth R. Wisse
Jews and Power
Nextbook Schocken
Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power and
demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets.
Jews and Power contains much information in few pages and offers a simple argument: Zionism is the solution to Jewish powerlessness; Israel is the guarantor of the Jews’ safety. Further, the Jewish nation’s resumption of sovereignty in 1948 created opportunities for the Jews to bring benefits to humanity as a whole.
Ruth R. Wisse
The Modern Jewish Canon
Free Press
What makes a great Jewish book? What makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Wisse sets out to answer these questions in this book and takes us on an exhilarating journey through language and culture, penetrating the complexities of Jewish life as they are expressed in the greatest Jewish novels of the twentieth century, from Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick. In The modern Jewish canon Wisse comprises those books that convey an experience of Jewish actuality, those in which "the authors or characters know and let the reader know that they are Jews," for better or worse. |
