Ruth Wisse was born into a dangerous world in a dark time: Romania in 1936. She grew up in Montreal, “a land of peace and prosperity where a child could work to become anything she reasonably wanted,” as she wrote in her beautiful memoir, with its characteristically bold title: Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation. As a writer, scholar, and professor—first at McGill, then at Harvard, where she held the first endowed chair in Yiddish literature, and where she taught Yiddish and comparative literature from 1993 until 2014—freedom has often been her great theme. The freedom Wisse celebrates is “a rooted freedom,” as she calls it in her memoir, which must be cherished if it is to be defended, and defended if it is to be transmitted to the next generation.
Wisse was an inspired choice to deliver this year’s Jefferson Lecture, which the National Endowment for the Humanities, its sponsor, calls “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” The Free Press is honored to publish her words below.
Steeped in gratitude, Wisse’s talk is a love letter to her adoptive country, but also a warning to her fellow citizens, issued by someone “increasingly protective of what can only remain the land of the free if we are determined to conserve it.” —The Editors
It is a great privilege to be giving the Jefferson Lecture. There have been many far more distinguished speakers in this series, but I think none has been older, and no one more grateful. As an adult immigrant who loved this country from afar long before I became a citizen, I bless the United States for its bounty and for the freedoms it guarantees us. The more I cherish all the good that it does, the less I understand those who take it for granted. This makes me increasingly protective of what can only remain the land of the free if we are determined to conserve it.
