To encounter Ruth Wisse is to learn from her, and I was blessed to be her student for the first time a decade ago. She, an eminent scholar of literature at Harvard, spent a weekend with us, a group of Jewish students in the Tikvah Fund’s then-nascent Collegiate Summer Honors program, doing what comes most naturally to her: teaching. She did so in her inimitable way. One of my friends described it precisely, remarking that Wisse was three-quarters Harvard professor, raising novel interpretations of the texts before us with erudition and articulateness, and one-quarter your bubbe at the Shabbat table speaking plain truths about the world. That persona made her all the more endearing and perhaps even more effective; from among her students that weekend I now count multiple brilliant young litigators, several professors and teachers, and a prolific member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
Declaring what is plainly, if painfully, true about the world is today rarely conceived of as the role of the professor. Wisse’s willingness to do so, that weekend and throughout her career, qualifies her as something more akin to a prophetess. With clear descriptions of the world taking shape in the late 20th century, courageous denunciations of its comforting misapprehensions and false pieties, and a call for Jews (and indeed all Westerners) to examine the crumbling foundation of liberal universalism, Wisse delivered a most unwelcome set of prophesies in 1992’s If I Am Not for Myself. Committing heresy after heresy among liberal Jewish company, she proclaimed that Soviet antisemitism was transmogrifying into Arab anti-Zionism; that “in misguided effort” Jews are “tempted to try to elicit from bystanders and witnesses the same pity” they had seen other victims enjoy; and that antisemitism “continues to be regarded as a disreputable sentiment achieving a certain legitimacy only when it travels under the cover of anti-Zionism.”
No wonder the publisher Wicked Son deemed it worthy of republication in 2026, with new front matter including a preface from Wisse herself. These revelations, scoffed at in their time, could have been copied-and-pasted into the bewildered social media posts of Jews after October 7, 2023, confronting the liberal West’s failure to consign anti-Jewish politics to history. Indeed, anti-Jewish politics have only gained prominence since throngs of barbarians gathered throughout the West to celebrate the Hamas-led massacre and blame the Jews for their own misfortune. If Jewish families didn’t want to be burned alive, perhaps they shouldn’t have dared to live in a particular place at a particular time—to be colonizers, the newest category of un-person invented to ensure Jewish children would once again endure medieval horrors without weighing too heavily on the conscience of the enlightened liberal West.
Some definitions are necessary to understand Wisse’s simple but penetrating thesis. She speaks often of “liberalism,” by which she means the consensus postwar view that humanity was on a positive moral trajectory, with reason prevailing over dogma and peace generally prevailing over war. Without castigating liberalism’s political manifestations—individual liberty, the rule of law, and so on—Wisse takes aim at liberal universalism, or the view that everyone, even avowed enemies of the Jews, could be reasoned with and ultimately pacified. Once-ubiquitous demands for Israel to give up “land for peace” exemplified this view; in hindsight they would be quaint if they hadn’t been so destructive.
Wisse also pioneered the view that antisemitism could not be understood simply as a manifestation of bigotry. It is, rather, the orientation of “politics against the Jews.” This, too, presaged the rise of political movements superficially belonging to left and right uniting over conspiracies about the role of “Zionists” in American government. It also clarifies liberalism’s great shortcoming: While liberal universalism deftly wielded the language of brotherhood to mount courageous efforts against racism, sexism, and other hatreds, it could not conceptualize the politics Wisse now calls Antiism—a wholesale rejection of Westernism—because it seems irrational. Arresting the “negative ideology” of Antiism would require something other than arguments about equality; the West had to “confront the aggressors with sufficient political, moral, and military resolve.” Liberalism could only offer a politics of freedom, a morality of pluralism, and a reluctance to crush evil by force, if necessary. It relied upon too rosy a picture of human nature to acknowledge antisemitism for what it was: “the ultimate negative campaign, the ultimate challenge to liberal belief.”
Publisher Adam Bellow puts it more positively in a bracing note that opens the new edition. “The defense of the Jew is the ultimate test of the vitality and moral strength of liberalism itself,” he writes. If liberalism cannot see how its enemies exploit liberalism’s compassion for apparent victims—which leaves liberals unable to conclude that it is good that Israel has defeated its eliminationist neighbors, and indeed leaves the Jewish state morally suspect—it will meet its “moral and intellectual collapse,” having “lost the will to stand for and defend its own values.”
Exposing an ideology’s weakness is only effective inasmuch as it can reach those who continue to cling to it. Wisse’s book takes its title from a millennia-old Jewish teaching: “If I am not for myself,” asked the sage Hillel, “who will be for me?” It is critical of liberals in the West but more so of Jews who have only internalized Hillel’s second teaching: “But if I am only for myself, what am I?” They continue to stoke liberalism’s dying coals, putting their faith in social justice bona fides and “allyship,” thinking that some combination of merit and sympathy for the Jewish plight can fend off the barbarians at the gate. Ever eager to speak the harsh truth, Wisse eviscerates Western liberal Jews who “sacrifice the Jews”—those militaristic Israelis—”to liberal pieties,” not realizing they are actually stoking self-defeating politics.
Those miscalculations should serve as a warning to the West, if it has the will to preserve its liberal heritage. One lesson, familiar to Wisse’s students, is not to indulge the “fantasy … that imparting information about the murder of the Jews of Europe will ensure its never happening again.” Showcasing one’s own weakness does nothing to placate illiberal enemies. To the contrary, what to the West looks like “innocence” appears more like an admission of guilt to those for whom violence is routine. “Something must be wrong with the Jews if they were selected as a target.”
Paul Berman would elaborate upon this point a decade later, analyzing the seemingly paradoxical success of grotesque Palestinian suicide bombings in turning world opinion against Israel. “Each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis,” because the liberal mind could not otherwise make sense of such depravity. “Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt.” Politics against the Jews—indeed against the West that abhors depravity—has only become more explicit over the last three years. If Hamas and the Gazans that followed them to rape and pillage could commit such unspeakable acts, Israel’s sins must be even graver than previously thought. American support for the iniquitous regime, moreover, could not be because it sees Israel as a decent nation and democratic ally, but because the United States is controlled by Zionists. Yet disavowing AIPAC—as Democrats like Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel recently have—only signals to the Antiists that they are gaining ground.
Wisse foresaw, and spoke plainly, the truth that weakness is not strength, and innocence means nothing when your enemies are playing an entirely different game. She pressed Jews in America to stop touting how moral and self-critical they could be. It’s fine to hold yourself to a high standard in one’s personal religious life, but “in politics it is not God who holds Israel to a double standard, but fellow states.” Going out of one’s way to prove that you are not just a state like any other, but a moral paragon, does nothing to persuade hostile enemies who see Western virtue as something to exploit, not emulate.
Leftists in the West have in recent years fallen out of the habit of saying that they love America and consider their criticisms patriotic, and into the custom of saying America is rotten, the worst nation to have ever existed, the source of all the world’s evils. Liberals have not mustered much defense against the rise of these revolutionaries, having lost the lexicon of cherishing Western civilization both because it is objectively better than the alternatives and because it is ours. If they cannot hear Wisse’s plea to become just a bit more hard-headed, stop catering to those who cannot be placated, and defend their own goodness, liberalism’s inadequacy to defend the Jews will appear in hindsight as prologue to liberalism’s betrayal of itself.
If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews
by Ruth R. Wisse
Wicked Son, 200 pp., $19.99
Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow and adviser to the president at the Manhattan Institute.
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