Podcast: Ruth Wisse on the Explosion of Anti-Israel Protests on Campus

The scholar and frequent commentator puts the protests and protestors in their proper context.

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the campus of Cal State University Los Angeles on May 2. Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the campus of Cal State University Los Angeles on May 2. Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.
Observation
Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic and Ruth R. Wisse
May 3 2024
About the authors

A weekly podcast, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund, offering up the best thinking on Jewish thought and culture.

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.

Podcast: Ruth Wisse

 

Anti-Israel campus activism has never been more popular or unpleasant than it is right now. In years past, much of this activism was mixed up with nods to the desire for peace and a two-state solution that would allow for Palestinians to enjoy their own sovereignty alongside a secure Israel. That isn’t happening now. It certainly isn’t what is meant by the chants, now common at the most prestigious universities in the United States, that call for the globalization of the intifada or that give voice to the delusion that Israel can be unborn.

To analyze the protests, the protestors, and their slogans, Ruth Wisse, the scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literature and history, and the author of books including Jews and Power, joins Jonathan Silver.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

 
 
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