Juliana Pilon, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), has high praise for the autobiography of Ruth Wisse, one of the most influential scholars of Jewish history and culture of her generation. Wisse’s “extraordinary” book Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation , Dr. Pilon writes, “is a powerful warning against the loss of freedom—not only that of Jews, in Israel and in the diaspora, but that of all civilized humanity.”
Before the outbreak of World War II, Dr. Wisse emigrated with her family to Montreal from a city now located in the Ukraine. In 1993, she moved to the United States and began teaching at Harvard. That journey “sealed her fate as ‘a combatant in the war over the future of America. . .. [S]he understood that Jewish culture, Israel’s survival, and America’s founding principles were intimately interrelated, all predicated on the inviolability of individual freedom. For while all tyrannies are not necessarily anti-Semitic, ‘all anti-Jewish ideologies are antiliberal.’ Thus ‘free as a Jew’ is not synonymous with ‘as free as a Jew.’”
Her review appears in November 24 issue of the online journal Law & Liberty, sponsored by Liberty Fund. The journal seeks to promote understanding of “the classical liberal tradition of law and politics and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons.”
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