Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that every culture hands its members a plan for mattering. The plan tells a man what counts as a life well spent, what raises him above the worm and the dirt, what lets him believe his death will not erase him. Becker called the plan a hero system. Inside it, a handful of words turn sacred. They name the tokens a man trades for significance. Honor. Purity. Freedom. Service. The words look universal. They are not. Each one means what its system needs it to mean, and a man raised in one system can hear the same word spoken in another and feel nothing at all, or feel disgust.
Ruth Wisse (b. 1936) spent a career on this recognition before she fought a single political fight over it.
Her first book, The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero (1971), took the luckless fool of Yiddish letters and read him as the central figure of the modern Jewish imagination. The schlemiel loses. He spills the soup, marries the wrong woman, misses the train, trusts the man who robs him. The world breaks him and he keeps his sweetness. In the breaking, Wisse found a claim. The fool’s defeat indicts the world that defeats him. He cannot win, so he turns losing into the proof of his soul. He has no army and no court that will hear him, so he keeps his wit and his wound and makes them a sign that he stands higher than the men who crush him.
The schlemiel offers a hero system. It hands the powerless a way to matter. You own no land you can hold and no force that answers to you, and you survive by converting that condition into a verdict against power as such. Strength becomes the marker of the brute. Weakness becomes the marker of the just. A man dies poor and beaten and the system tells him he died right.
Wisse the scholar loved this figure. Wisse the political writer spent forty years warning that a people might die of him.
Jews and Power (2007) is the warning set down in full. She read the long exile as a school that taught Jews to treat weakness as wisdom, accommodation as ethics, the refusal of force as a higher law. The lesson worked for centuries. A people without a state learned to bend, to pay, to flatter the prince, to survive by never holding the sword. Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the strategy failed in the worst way a strategy can fail a people, and no amount of moral elevation answered the trains. Zionism, in her reading, recovered the thing exile had taught Jews to despise. Power. Not a sin to confess but the price of staying alive.
So the figure that anchors her scholarship becomes the alarm of her politics. The schlemiel on the page is a treasure. The schlemiel running a foreign ministry is a death sentence.
Power is her sacred word, and she uses it against the grain of almost everyone around her. To see how strange her usage runs, set it beside the others.
Walk into a Friends meeting house on a cold morning. The benches face inward. Nobody speaks until the Spirit moves him, and when a man rises he speaks of the light, not of force. Here power is the thing the righteous lay down. The Quaker earns his place in the order of the saved by renunciation. To hold a weapon, to command, to compel, all of it stains. A man matters in this room by how much he refuses. Tell him that a people has a duty to seize power and you have described to him a fall from grace. He hears in Wisse the voice of the world he left.
Down the corridor from Wisse’s own department sits the seminar where power means the opposite again. The graduate students there breathe a theory that owes its temper to Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Power is the air. It runs through every clinic and classroom and bedroom, capillary, total, hidden in the things that look most innocent. The hero of this system is the one who unmasks it. He earns significance by exposure, by naming the domination others cannot see. To want power, to call for it openly as a good, marks a man as the villain the seminar exists to catch. Wisse walks in asking Jews to gather strength and take it, and the room hears the enemy speaking without shame.
Cross the ocean to a hill town where an older man holds court at a back table. For him power and respect are one word. A man is what other men dare not do to him. To be strong is to be safe and to be safe is to be a man, and the one without strength gets eaten and deserves the eating. This patriarch would understand Wisse’s politics in his marrow. He has never needed a book to tell him that the weak are prey. Hand him The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero and he would not finish the first chapter. The fool who turns his beating into a halo strikes him as the lowest thing alive, a man who licks the boot and calls the taste honey.
Sit a fourth man on a cushion in a monastery in the hills above a valley in Sri Lanka. He has shaved his head and given away his name. For him the only power worth the word is power over the self, and a man wins it by emptying the self until there is nothing left to defend. Worldly power is the heaviest chain. The prince and the general drag more weight toward the next life than the beggar does. To this monk, Wisse’s nation under arms is a vast and clever cage, a people that has mistaken the lock for the key. He would grieve for her the way one grieves for the diligent.
Four rooms, one word, four salvations that cannot share a house. The Quaker is saved by laying power down. The theorist by exposing it. The patriarch by holding it. The monk by escaping it. Wisse stands apart from all of them. She says a people is saved by taking power and keeping it and refusing to apologize for the taking, and she says this knowing the company it puts her in, because she has read every argument the other rooms can make and judged them luxuries of men who were never marched anywhere.
The same split runs through her other sacred words. Free As A Jew (2021), her memoir, carries the subtitle A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, and the phrase tells you that freedom for Wisse is a thing a people wins together or not at all. The founder who prizes the unencumbered self hears freedom as escape from the group, from the family, from the inherited claim. Wisse hears it as the group grown strong enough that escape stops being the only safety a man can find. To her the lone free individual standing outside any people is a man who has not yet met the morning when the people he disowned would have been the only thing between him and the dark.
If I Am Not For Myself (1992) takes its title from Hillel and aims it at the liberal conscience. The liberal earns significance by transcending his tribe, by caring for the stranger first and the cousin second, by treating loyalty to his own as a smallness he has outgrown. Wisse charges that a conscience built to erase your own people is a betrayal wearing the robes of ethics. The word universalism, sacred in one room as the proof of a large soul, reads in hers as the schlemiel’s old trick in a professor’s vocabulary, the powerless flattering himself that his powerlessness is moral height.
She returned to the comedy at the end. No Joke (2013) studies Jewish humor with love and with fear in equal measure. The joke lets the powerless feel superior to the man with the whip. It also lets him stay under the whip and laugh. The same instrument saves and sedates. The schlemiel’s wit is his blade and his bed, and Wisse spent her late career trying to wake the man who had grown comfortable lying in it.
Her refusal to soften made her a figure of controversy long before the campus turned against her. She once described Palestinians as people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery, and the line followed her for decades, quoted by every critic who wanted to show the cost of her hardness. She did not retract it. In her system the cruelty of plain speech ranks below the cruelty of comforting lies, and a sentence that makes an enemy of the squeamish is a sentence doing its work.
The clearest scene came at Harvard in the fall of 2010. Wisse held the Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature, a chair named for the editor and patron Martin Peretz (b. 1938), no relation to the Yiddish master I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) whose reader she edited. The university moved to cancel an event honoring the man whose name she carried, after he wrote a line dismissing Muslim life. Wisse defended him and called the campus reaction groupthink. She argued that asking Muslims to condemn the violence among them counted as liberality rather than bigotry. The room she stood in by then ran on the theorist’s creed, where her defense sounded like the villain confessing, and she made it anyway, holding a chair named for the accused, an old woman telling a faculty that had stopped listening to her exactly what she thought.
Here the essay has to face the thing that makes Wisse rare among the subjects of a hero system reading. She is a scholar of hero systems. The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero is a study of one. She knows the frame from the inside, names the powerless their own form of nobility, and then turns and chooses against it. The question she leaves behind is whether she escaped the schlemiel or only built his opposite.
Becker would say no man escapes. There is no standing outside every system, no view from nowhere that lets you keep significance without a story that confers it. There is only the choice of which story, and whether you know you are inside one. Wisse’s counter-hero, the armed and sovereign Jew who apologizes to no one, is a hero system in its own right. It has its sacred tokens, power and sovereignty and national honor, and its own denials, and it can curdle into the patriarch at the back table who mistakes contempt for strength. She knew this. The knowing is the honest part of her. She did not pretend the sovereign Jew floated free of the conditions that made him. She named the schlemiel a hero system, weighed it, and rejected it with open eyes, on the ground that a beautiful answer to powerlessness is still an answer to powerlessness, and a people that loves the answer too long forgets to fix the condition.
What she could not promise, and did not, was that the cure keeps its memory. The schlemiel knew something true about the men who hold the whip, because he had spent two thousand years on the wrong end of it. The sovereign Jew commands the whip now. Wisse spent her life arguing he had to. She left open the harder question, the one Becker would have pressed, of whether a people can hold power and still hold what the powerless understood, or whether each hero system buys its courage by forgetting the wisdom of the one it replaced.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides an emphatic confirmation of the central cultural and political theories of Ruth Wisse
Wisse has spent decades analyzing the intersection of literature, politics, and Jewish survival. In foundational books like If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992) and Jews and Power (2007), she mounts a relentless critique of modern liberal universalism. She argues that the Jewish people’s historical vulnerability stems from an over-reliance on moral suasion, international law, and the goodwill of others, which blinds them to the hard reality of political hostility. Wisse champions a robust, clear-eyed appreciation for national particularism and the legitimate exercise of political power.
Mearsheimer’s realism intersects with Wisse’s framework across several key concepts.
Wisse’s central polemic is that liberalism is dangerous for minority groups because it downplays the permanent reality of collective hatred and group competition. She argues that Jews who adopt a universalist, liberal worldview mistakenly believe that if they champion abstract human rights, the rest of the world will treat them as atomistic individuals rather than as members of a distinct tribe. Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion validates Wisse’s core thesis. Liberalism’s fundamental error is its treatment of people as lone choosers rather than as social animals embedded in competing groups. When Wisse observes that universalist liberal illusions leave a society unprotected against aggressive, cohesive neighbors, she is describing exactly what Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts.
As a preeminent scholar of Yiddish literature, Wisse treats the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer not merely as aesthetic monuments, but as psychological maps of a people navigating stateless vulnerability. In The Modern Jewish Canon (2000), she tracks how literature serves to sustain collective consciousness, preserve memory, and reinforce internal cohesion without the protective framework of a state. Mearsheimer’s concept of the “value infusion” explains why this literature possesses such enduring power. The child downloads the group’s stories and moral categories long before his independent critical reason matures. The rich linguistic and narrative heritage Wisse spent her career documenting is the literal tool used to seal group identity, anchoring the individual within the survival vehicle of the culture.
In Jews and Power, Wisse argues that the return to sovereignty in the State of Israel required an agonizing psychological shift away from the traditional diasporic strategy of accommodation toward the hard management of military power. She views anti-Zionism not as an intellectual disagreement, but as an expression of the permanent, structural opposition that small, cohesive groups face from rival coalitions in the international arena. Mearsheimer’s structural realism confirms Wisse’s diagnosis: under conditions of international anarchy, any group that refuses to maximize its material power and defend its sovereignty will eventually be dominated by its neighbors. Wisse’s historical critique of Jewish political dependency is a literary expression of Mearsheimer’s hard realist architecture.
Wisse has consistently criticized Western intellectuals who seek a post-national, cosmopolitan world order, viewing their campaigns for global governance or universal human rights as a dangerous evasion of the primary duties owed to one’s own people. Mearsheimer, bolstered by alliance theory, agrees that the cosmopolitan is a tribesman in universal language. The belief that humanity can transcend its tribal baseline through shared liberal institutions is an anthropological fantasy. Wisse identifies this universalism as a targeted threat to her group’s survival; Mearsheimer identifies it as a structural delusion that inevitably shatters against the permanent reality of human nature and collective competition.
Ruth Wisse’s intellectual brand is built on explicitly exposing and mocking the progressive “misunderstandings myth.”
As the longtime Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard and a fierce polemicist for Commentary, Wisse spent her career arguing that Western liberals suffer from a delusional, suicidal misunderstanding about the nature of politics and antisemitism.
If Pinsof is right, Wisse’s fierce anti-liberal realism is not an escape from the intellectual status game. It is a highly sophisticated, conservative variant of it.
In her landmark 1992 book, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Wisse argued that Jewish liberals suffer from a pathology of universalism. She claimed they foolishly believe that if they are nice, progressive, and demonstrate universal empathy, the rest of the world will stop hating them. She framed this as a devastating cognitive and historical error.
Wisse is using the language of delusion to weaponize her own intellectual position. By framing liberal universalism as a naive “whoopsie” or a mental defect, she avoids recognizing that progressive Jewish intellectuals are actually rational actors playing a different coalitional strategy.
For a progressive academic in a secular university, championing universalism and civil rights is a highly effective way to forge alliances with other elite factions and secure status within the institution. Wisse does not admit that this is a rational turf strategy; she calls it a “betrayal” and a delusion. This allows her to position her circle—the neoconservative, nationalist intelligentsia—as the only adult in the room who truly understands reality.
Wisse’s literary scholarship, from The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971) to Jews and Power (2007), argues that because Jews lacked a state and control over a military apparatus for two millennia, they developed a brilliant but dangerous literary culture that sublimated weakness into moral superiority. The “schlemiel” (the classic comic underdog) wins arguments by being a moral victim, completely helpless against raw force. Wisse warned that this literary habit crippled the Jewish ability to understand and wield hard state power.
Wisse’s critique of the “moral underdog” is a direct strike against a rival currency. The intellectual class excels at transforming material weakness into moral authority; it is their primary tool to make the strong feel guilty and cede control.By declaring that the celebration of helplessness is a dangerous cultural malfunction, Wisse attempts to devalue the currency of the universalist literary elite. She is engaged in a zero-sum turf war over what kind of intellectual gets to advise the state. She wants to replace the soft, empathetic literary critic with the hard-headed, strategic intellectual who understands that politics is about drawing borders, identifying enemies, and using the coercive apparatus of the state at gunpoint.
Wisse pioneered the academic study of Yiddish literature, culminating in The Modern Jewish Canon (2000). She did not want Yiddish studied merely as a nostalgic, dead dialect of secular socialists. She curated the canon to highlight writers who wrestled with national survival, theological rigor, and the harsh realities of political power.
Pisnof might say that the creation of The Modern Jewish Canon was a flawless exercise in elite resource acquisition and institutional control. In the late twentieth-century university, the old WASP literary monopoly was breaking down. New ethnic studies departments were popping up, usually dominated by the progressive left.
Wisse did not fight this trend by defending the old order; she launched a counter-takeover.
By institutionalizing Yiddish at Harvard under her specific, national-conservative framework, she carved out an independent fiefdom. She ensured that you could not study this massive repository of European Jewish culture without using her textbooks, her anthologies, and her political framing.
Wisse demonstrates Pinsof’s ultimate point. The world functions exactly as natural selection designed it to: rival coalitions fighting for dominance, territory, and institutional real estate. Wisse mocks the progressive intellectuals for thinking they can save the world through soft, empathetic reading lists. But her solution is identical: a hard, nationalist reading list that establishes her as the high priestess of the canon, collecting elite credentials from Harvard while expertly managing the view from her own corner of the hole.
