1. Shandler, Jeffrey, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar. His one exception is the association of Yiddish with the struggle for gay rights, which he terms “queer Yiddishkeit.”

2. Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 82Google Scholar.

3. Ibid.

4. Moral values such as “cultural nationalism, moral righteousness, Christianity (of a certain evangelical sort), family values, and right-to-life issues, and an antagonism to the new social movements such as feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, and environmentalism.” Ibid., 83–84.

5. Ibid., 49–50.

6. Murray Friedman, “Introduction: Commentary: The First Sixty Years,” in Commentary in American Life, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 4–7.

7. Friedman, Murray, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), iCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Ibid.

9. Brown, Wendy, Regulating Aversion Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Ibid.

11. See, in this regard, Michels, Tony, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

12. YIVO was a pioneer in both “the study of Yiddish speaking Jewry,” and “the use of Yiddish for scholarly research.” Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2.

13. Ibid., 99–111.

14. Merrill, Roberto and Weinstock, Daniel, eds., Political Neutrality: A Re-evaluation (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1Google Scholar.

15. Dorpalen, Andreas, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 31Google Scholar.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 56n66.

18. By “shift” or “step” toward the Right, I mean any movement toward the Right, including from the radical Left to centrist and moderate Left positions, or the arrival at a “rightist” position.

19. Nancy Sinkoff, “The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz's Postwar Jewish Cold War,” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia R. Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 33.

20. Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 34–35.

21. Sinkoff, “Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz's Postwar Jewish Cold War,” 33–34.

22. The latter shift, from secular Yiddishism to Orthodox Judaism, was also made at the time by Nathan Birnbaum, who (like his contemporary Jewish political ideologue Chaim Zhitlowsky) shared with Kalmanovitch a strong sense of political inconsistency. See Wistrich, Robert, “The Metamorphoses of Nathan Birnbaum,” in The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Published for the Littman Library by Oxford University Press, 1989), 381–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regarding Dawidowicz's fascination with Birnbaum, who was included in her anthology The Golden Tradition, see Nancy Sinkoff, “‘A Melancholy Offering Tendered with Esteem’: Gershom Scholem and Lucy S. Dawidowicz on Nathan Birnbaum, an Unexpected Conversation,” Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 3 (2017): 409–26.

23. Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 239n221. Joshua M. Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 277.

24. Gennady Estraikh, “Kalmanovitch, Zelig,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.YIVOencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kalmanovitch_Zelig.

25. Kalmanovitch, Zelig, “A togbukh in vilner geto,” YIVO bleter 35 (1951): 85, 206Google Scholar.

26. Sternhell, Zeev, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On Merḥavia see p. 176.

27. Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1976), 175.

28. Sinkoff, “Polishness,” 32–34.

29. Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 215–21. Bloom gives a handful of examples for this trend, including the influence exerted by Hannah Arendt's conceptualization of totalitarianism (219–20). In recent decades the “Red menace” has been replaced by a shift to fear of the “Islamic menace.” See Atif A. Kubursi, “The Arab Economy in Western Eyes,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said, ed. N. Aruri and M. A. Shuraydi (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001).

30. Sinkoff, “Polishness,” 36–43. Citing Richard Hofstadter, Harvey links the politics of neoconservatism and McCarthyism as “the paranoid style of American politics.” Both of which simultaneously emphasize the enemies to the nation from within and without (Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 82–83).

31. In contrast, at the same time in France, where no equivalent campaign took place, the French Communist Party was at its heyday, receiving much-deserved credit for its role in the Résistance.

32. Atkinson, Brooks, Broadway (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 426Google Scholar.

33. Midge Decter, “Belittling Sholem Aleichem's Jews: Folk Falsification of the Ghetto,” Commentary, April 1954, 389–92. See also the discussion of Midge Decter's essay in Jeremy Dauber's biography of Sholem Aleichem: The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (New York: Schocken, 2013), 347–49; and in Solomon, Alisa, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 71–72Google Scholar.

34. Decter, “Belittling Sholem Aleichem's Jews,” 391–92.

35. Regarding the positive stance toward McCarthy and McCarthyism of anticommunist Jews associated with Commentary (still in its pre-neoconservative stage), Abrams notes how in his biography, Irving Howe, a socialist Jewish intellectual, attacked Commentary on its record on McCarthyism. According to Howe, in contrast to most of the country, which was worried about McCarthy, “Commentary worried about those who profited from the struggle against McCarthy.” Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982), 215–17. This attack was Decter's main objection to Howe in her harsh review of his book, Midge Decter, “Socialism and Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,” Commentary, December 1982, 27–33. Abrams writes of Podhoretz's attempt in 1976 (despite earlier expressions of shame regarding his involvement in the persecutions of the 1950s), as the editor of Commentary since 1960, “to revive the legacy of McCarthyism in order to resurrect its good name as a guiding ideological theme for his magazine. In this way, he hoped to erase any tarnishing of anti-Communism.” Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons (New York: Continuum, 2010), 142–44.

36. Counterattack 7, no. 39, September 25, 1953, 1. It is worth noting that at the same time that Decter praised Sholem Aleichem (as possessing “his own special genius for perceiving and communicating”) and Hartnett praised him (as “anti-Communist”) for one set of reasons, he was being hailed in the Soviet Union for being a true people's writer. In fact, the bulk of the critical appraisals of Sholem Aleichem that appeared after his death in 1916 throughout the Jewish world were written by Soviet scholars and critics. Dan Miron, “Sholem Aleichem,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Sholem_Aleichem.

37. Counterattack 8, no. 13, March 26, 1954, 3.

38. Sholem Aleichem, “Gimnaziye,” in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem (New York: Sholem-Aleykhem folḳsfond, 1927), 26, 191–93. For more on the political aspects of the play and its production, see Adi Mahalel, “We Will Not Be Silent: I. L. Peretz's ‘Bontshe the Silent’ vs. 1950s McCarthyism in America and the Story of the Staging of The World of Sholom Aleichem,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 34, no. 2 (2015): 204–30; Bernuth, Ruth von, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 17–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. Counterattack 7, no. 39, September 25, 1953, 5.

40. Peter Meyer, Bernard D. Weinryb, Eugene Duschinsky, and Nicolas Sylavain, eds., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1953), vi.

41. Shneer, David, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 219Google Scholar.

42. In Yiddish, “Di yidishe imigratsye keyn england sof 19tn yorhundert,” YIVO-bleter 19–20 (1942): 402; and her article in the YIVO journal: Libe Shildkret, “Hashoyfer: a kapitl geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in england” [Hashofar: A chapter in the history of the Yiddish press in England], YIVO-bleter 15 (1940): 217–24. She is credited as the secretary of the intern program (directed by YIVO head Max Weinreich) in YIVO-bleter 20 (1942): 157. Weinreich credits her for compiling the bibliography of YIVO: see Max Weinreich, “Der YIVO in a yor fun umkum” [YIVO during a year of mass murder], YIVO-bleter 21 (1943): 99.

43. Nancy Sinkoff, introduction to Dawidowicz, Lucy, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), xv, xxviiiGoogle Scholar.

44. Lucy Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 60–61. To the last sentence she adds in parenthesis the popular argument that “social justice originated in Jewish Law, did it not?”

45. See, for example, her review of Gary T. Marx's Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community (1967) in Commentary, where she accuses the author of being uncritically apologetic for black militancy: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Can Anti-Semitism Be Measured?,” Commentary, July 1970. For an examination of the developing ethnic-class politics of the Bund, see for example Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).

46. Dawidowicz, Golden Tradition, 79.

47. However, even in these selections, her choice of texts and her introductions to the excerpts express conservative tendencies. For example, when she introduced the Jewish anarchist Sholem Schwartzbard, she minimized his political commitments because only “publicly” did he express “his sympathy for the anarchists,” who used “that most un-Jewish revolutionary tactic of assassination for a Jewish purpose” (otherwise “he was apparently too undisciplined to adhere formally to any organization”) (ibid., 448). She chose to include a text by Trotsky, “A Social Democrat Only,” to persuade the readers that communist commitments are diametrically opposed to any form of Jewishness (ibid., 441–47).

48. As Schreier, Benjamin, The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, writes, “her influence is attested even in much of the work that challenges her. An indication of her leading or hegemonic role can be found in the frequency with which the phrase ‘brilliant but flawed’ and its ideological cognates can be found in reference to her work.” Schreier offers a poignant analysis of Wisse's devotion to, and influence on, the neoconservative agenda; of her staunch racialist Zionism; and of her attempt to reconstruct a Jewish nationalist literary canon based on these ideas. “Few have worked more dutifully to oversee a professionally rigorous identity-based Jewish literary and cultural history with a normalized concept of national identity than has Ruth Wisse” (ibid., 131; also ibid., 13–16, 131–44).

49. Sinkoff, introduction, xiv. See also Sinkoff, “A Melancholy Offering Tendered with Esteem,” 424n51. Wisse attested that her turning toward conservatism “a little earlier than the 1960s” was due to Lionel Trilling's anticommunist (or anti-Stalinist) novel Middle of the Journey (1947), which she suggests “is the original text of neoconservatism.” “Ruth Wisse and Seth Lipsky: Facing Up to Evil: A Conversation,” November 15, 2008, http://spme.org/boycotts-divestments-sanctions-bds/boycotts-divestments-and-sanctions-bds-news/ruth-wisse-and-seth-lipsky-facing-up-to-evil-a-conversation/5792/. Klingenstein, Susanne, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930–90 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 313Google Scholar, writes that Wisse's political turn happened later, in the early 1970s.

50. According to the online archive of Commentary, Dawidowicz contributed 41 times to the magazine (Dec 1951 – Dec 1990), Decter 69 times (Oct 1950 – Oct 2009), and Wisse no fewer than 85 times (June 1976 – Nov 2019) (see https://www.commentarymagazine.com/issues/). The expression “neocon Bible” to describe Commentary is taken from Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, i.

51. See the chapter devoted to Wisse's intellectual biography from a very sympathetic perspective in Klingenstein, Enlarging America, 304–46. Klingenstein writes that “Max Weinreich became one of [Wisse's] most significant and beloved teachers” (ibid., 323). However, her drift to the Right made her critical of Weinreich's Diaspora nationalism and his lack of support for Jewish military national power. Wisse considered Max Weinreich, together with the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, to have “godfathered my Yiddish studies.” Ruth R. Wisse, “The Poet from Vilna,” Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2010, 12.

52. “Holocaust or War against the Jews,” Internet Archive, November 21, 1991, https://archive.org/details/ybc-fbr-1542_5537/02-1542B.WAV.

53. See Gillota, David, “Negotiating Jewishness: Curb Your Enthusiasm and the Schlemiel Tradition,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 4 (2010): 154CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wisse has echoed here the sentiment expressed in her first book, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

54. Jacob Glatstein, Ruth R. Wisse, Maier Deshell, and Norbert Guterman, eds., The Glatstein Chronicles, The New Yiddish Library (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 395. See also “Major Effort Under Way to Retrieve and Reclaim Yiddish Literature,” February 7, 1986, https://www.jta.org/1986/02/07/archive/major-effort-under-way-to-retrieve-and-reclaim-yiddish-literature. That same year (1987), in her polemical article in Commentary against the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, who chose to stay in Poland after the war, Dawidowicz referenced Wisse's article in Commentary from two months prior, see Lucy Dawidowicz, “Observations: The Curious Case of Marek Edelman,” Commentary, March 1987, 66.

55. Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, 208.

56. See his sympathetic obituary in the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard: Michael Makovsky, “Martin Gilbert, 1936–2015,” The Weekly Standard, February 25, 2015, https://www.weeklystandard.com/michael-makovsky/martin-gilbert-1936-2015-840221.

57. “Societies and Organizations,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 9, no. 2 (1987): 25–26.

58. Klingenstein, Enlarging America, 313–14. The rest of the assembled board members included Dan Miron, Irving Howe, and Michael Stanislawski.

59. Leah Garrett's analysis of Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro was published as part of the sequel to the series The New Yiddish Library, now edited by David Roskies. Garrett struggles to reconcile Shapiro's communist commitments and presents a false contrast between the social criticism in the text and the status of an individual character under those same social conditions: “Typical of the Communist platform that Shapiro was embracing at the time, the story [‘New Yorkish’] critiques American society as devoid of meaning and as corrupt and racist. Yet the tale transcends ideology as well by its remarkable portrayal of individual loss.” Leah Garrett, “Dazed and Confused: Lamed Shapiro's American Stories,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 30 (2011): 53; in an endnote, Garrett profusely thanks Roskies for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the essay. For Ansky (other than the introductions in the series by Garrett and Roskies), see David G. Roskies, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 243–60.

60. See Chone Shmeruk, Peretses yiesh-vizye: Interpretatsye fun Y. L. Peretes Bay nakht oyfn altn mark [Peretz's vision of despair: Interpretation of I. L. Peretz's Night at the Old Market] (New York: YIVO, 1971). A contemporary scholar who, to my mind, continues Shmeruk's line of Peretz interpretation is Marc Caplan, in “The Fragmentation of Narrative Perspective in Y. L. Peretz's Bilder fun a Provints-Rayze,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 14, no. 1 (2007): 63–88.

61. See Wisse, Ruth, Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

62. I. L. Peretz, “Vos viln mir?” [What do we want?], in Literatur un leben: A zaml-bukh far literatur un gezelshaft, ed. I. L. Peretz (Warsaw: Funk, 1894).

63. Nicham Ross, “I. L. Peretz's ‘Between Two Mountains’: Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Literary Modernity,” in Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, ed. Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 114–15; and Adi Mahalel, “Weaving the Revolution: I. L. Peretz the Social Protest Writer,” In geveb (May 2016), https://ingeveb.org/articles/weaving-the-revolution-i-l-peretz-the-social-protest-writer.

64. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 109.

65. The tendency to blame Jews for their own persecution has a history in Zionist thought that can be traced back to Bialik's influential poem “In the City of Slaughter” (1904). See Michael Gluzman, Hannan Hever and Dan Miron, Be-ʿir ha-haregah: Bikur me'uḥar [In the city of slaughter: A visit at twilight] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005). The antipacifist statements made during the Vietnam War by leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz describing wars as “the final safeguard of Freedom” shaped Wisse's pro-military-interventionism world view (Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, 147). Regarding the enormous human cost of the Vietnam War, see Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Picador, 2013).

66. Quoted in Yechiam Vitz, “The Marketer of Anxieties” [in Hebrew], Ynet, March 9, 2012, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4200539,00.html.

67. Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 15–16. As Miron cleverly points out, after hearing testimonies of survivors during the Eichmann trial in 1961, “Many Israelis understood for the first time that the chasm between themselves, as those who had left Europe ‘in time,’ and those who ‘went like sheep to the slaughter’ was imaginary and that Zionism was the answer to Hitler only due to the two hundred miles that separated Rommel's African army from Mandatory Palestine, which the British were about to abandon, were it not for Montgomery's victory at El-Alamain.” Unfortunately, Miron continues, this acquired sense of vulnerability in the Israeli ethos did not push Israel to seek a better and more peaceful world, but rather “much of what Israel did as a state and as a military power was dictated by lurking Holocaust memories and fears.” See also in this regard Avraham Burg. The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes (New York: Macmillan, 2008).

68. Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity, 80, 505n39. Miron based this idea on Peretz's keynote speech at the 1908 Yiddish-language conference in Czernowitz.

69. See Peretz's article, “Nationalism and Zionism,” in Y. L. Peretz, Ale verk fun Y. L. Perets, vol. 9 (New York: CYCO, 1947–48), 419; also quoted in Ze'ev Goldberg, “On Y.-L. Pereẓ’s Relationship to Zionism” [in Hebrew], Ḥulyot 7 (2002): 77.

70. See, for example, Meir Yaakov Fried, Yamim ve-shanim: Zikhronot ve-ẓiyurim mi-tekufah shel ḥamishim shanah [Days and years: Memoirs and vignettes from a fifty-year period] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1939), 2:85–86. And see Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Creation of Modern Jewish Culture, 107.

71. Taken from Peretz's poem “Brider” (Brothers), which was published at the end of the booklet I. L. Peretz for Youth, published in 1940 in Vilna, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. This is the same booklet that Wisse mentions at the beginning of her quote (Y. L. Perets, Y. L. Perets far yingere, heft 1 [Vilna: Grinike Beymelekh, 1940], 15).

72. Ruth R. Wisse, “Drowning in the Red Sea,” Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2011, 5–8. Wisse also engaged in moral condemnation of the communist Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952), who moved to the USSR, accusing him of compromising his later literary work and following the party line. See Ruth R. Wisse, “The Jewish Informer as Extortionist and Idealist,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry, ed. Richard L. Cohen, Jonathan Frankel, and Stephanie Hoffman (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010). For the opposing view, see Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, “David Bergelson's Judgement: A Critical Introduction,” in Judgement by David Bergelson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). For Glatstein's poem see Jacob Glatstein, “Qibya,” trans. Adi Mahalel, In geveb (February 2016).

73. Wisse, Ruth R., The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 61Google Scholar.

74. See, for example, the Zionist leanings of influential Jewish neoconservative Leo Strauss (Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, 40); Regarding the neocons’ main cultural platform, Commentary, Kimmage and Wisse have argued that it “was a Zionist magazine even before the founding of Israel.” Ruth R. Wisse, “The Jewishness of Commentary,” in Commentary in American Life, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 56. I agree with Schreier, Impossible Jew, 106, that “neoconservatism has justified itself by legitimating not only a narrative of its own rise out of socialism's self-immolating excesses but at the same time a narrative of the putatively self-evident relationship between Israel and Jewishness and of the inevitability of American Jews’ feelings in regard to this association.”

75. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 64.

76. Ibid., 50–51.

77. For Wisse, as Schreier points out, Impossible Jew, 131, the label “Marxism” is meant to be conflated and sound both “anti-American and anti-Semitic.”

78. This is perhaps unsurprising considering Wisse's opposition to the feminist movement, which she conflates with the “dangers” of Marxism. See Ruth Wisse, “Living with Women's Lib,” Commentary, August 1988, 40–46.

79. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 39.

80. Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, 231.

81. According to Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 63, Hodl, the revolutionary daughter, dabbles in “non-Jewish” behavior (50), and Chava assaults her father's very being by marrying a non-Jew. For a very different take on Tevye, viewing him as a greedy man, a misogynist eager to sell his daughters for a good price, and causing one of them to take her own life as a result, see Dan Miron, introduction to Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son, by Sholem Aleichem (New York: Penguin, 2009).

82. Wisse, Ruth R., No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She inserts such comments as if one has ever argued that authors could physically halt invading armies and shelter against bombs with their books and wit.

83. To sum up the book's flaws in their entirety is beyond the scope of this article. I would only point out its lack of any engagement with theoretical approaches to understanding humor from the last half century. Thus, not referring to scholarship regarding ethnic or dialect humor in the United States, while uncritically retaining the essentialist term “Jewish humor,” highlights just some of the book's fundamental analytical failures.

84. Ruth R. Wisse, “Singer's Paradoxical Progress,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981–), no. 1 (1981): 151. (A shortened version of this article was published in Commentary, February 1979, 33–38.) She had read this paper in a literary evening in honor of Singer's receiving the Nobel Prize in 1978, three days after the ceremony in Stockholm; see “Literarisher ovnt lekoved Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger tsum zayn bakumen dem nobel priz far literatur” [Literary evening in honor of Isaac Bashevis Singer for his receiving the Nobel Prize for literature] Internet Archive, December 13, 1978, https://archive.org/details/ybc-fbr-671_4670. Wisse repeated this view years later in a video interview about Singer, where she argued that Singer was also an antihumanist. According to Wisse, “[Singer] thought that humanism was worst of all the ‘ideologies.’” Yiddish Book Center, “Singer as Anti-Ideological and Anti-Humanistic,” YouTube, June 30, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfnUvh5f-9Y.

85. See Yechiel Szeintuch, “Sifrut, politikah ve-humor: Ha-pulmus ben Yiẓḥak Bashevis ve-Aron Ẓeytlin ʿorkhe ha-yarḥon Globus le-ven ha-shavuʿon Vokhnshrift ve-ha-yarḥon Literarishe tribune” [Literature, politics and humor: The polemics between Isaac Bashevis and Aaron Zeitlin editors of the monthly Globus and the weekly Vokhnshrift and monthly Literarishe tribune], Kesher 26 (1999): 67–78.

86. Ibid., 73; and I. Bashevis, “Tsu der frage fun dikhtung un politik” [On poetry and politics], Globus 1, no. 3 (September 1932): 39–49.

87. Ibid., 47. In the article he states clearly that his main opposition are the leftists who perpetuate class war in the name of the working class, and demand the author's commitment to the interests of this social class.

88. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 5.

89. Alexander, Edward, The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies: Personalities, Issues, Events (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 55Google Scholar.

90. Quoted in ibid.

91. Joseph Sherman, ”Singer, Isaac Bashevis,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Singer_Isaac_Bashevis. Edward Alexander fleshes out the more subtle antiprogressive sentiments in Singer's later novels, such as in The Slave, The Manor, The Estate, and Enemies: A Love Story. See Alexander, Jewish Idea and Its Enemies, 55–65. The chapter is entitled “Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jewish Utopianism.”

92. Singer, Isaac Bashevis and Burgin, Richard, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 58Google Scholar.

93. It is very likely that in this statement, Wisse had uncritically adopted Singer's own view of himself. Singer told an interviewer for Commentary in response to a question about possible Jewish socialist and Zionist influences he absorbed while growing up in Warsaw, that “just as I was skeptical about religious dogma, so was I skeptical about political dogmas,” and added that “there is no system which gives more power to the devil than Communism.” Joel Blocker and Richard Elman, “An Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Commentary, November 1963. To claim that being a political conservative does not mean supporting a particular ideology speaks volumes about the way Wisse normalizes her own conservative politics as the “obvious transparent” and “nonideological” state of being, as Wisse herself characterized the character of Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi in Satan in Goray, who desperately tries to oppose the messianic progressive agendas of repairing the world, in her introduction to Satan in Goray, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), xxxi–xxxiii.

94. Yiddish Book Center, “Singer's Popularity and Politics,” YouTube, August 9, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgk7Uvs_avM.

95. Wisse, introduction to Satan in Goray, xl. Wisse praises the novel specifically for its warning against the evils of Communism, and against “all such revolutionary ecstasies” (xl–xli). The novel showed “the fatal triumph of the revolutionary impulse that can never be stopped in time” (xxxviii). Wisse also knew Singer personally. In an email exchange with Wisse on January 31, 2018, she confirmed their acquaintance and wrote that “he was the Cohen at the Pidyon Haben of our eldest son,” meaning that Singer played a key role in a traditional religious ceremony following the birth of her son. Wisse claims they never discussed his writings, and that he was not interested in participating in publishing works of other Yiddish writers.

96. See “Literarisher ovnt lekoved Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger.”

97. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shadows on the Hudson, trans. Joseph Sherman (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998). It was first serialized in Yiddish as Shotns baym hodson, in the Forverts, from 1957–58.

98. Regarding his previously serialized novel in the Forward, The Family Moskat (1950), Singer attested to the amount of work he himself had to put into the translation: “When the book was finally translated, it was too large and I myself saw that it was far from being right. … I repeated many things and I missed many things. I worked on this book another two years—editing, cutting, and adding a number of chapters. I worked on it until it became as it is today.” Singer and Burgin, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, 22.

99. Israel Zamir quotes his father saying he rejected the pleas of the editor of the Forverts, Abe Cahan, to write about the suffering of Jewish workers. Israel Zamir, Journey to My Father: Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Arcade, 1995), 135. In his refusal to write about the plight of Jewish workers, Singer was rejecting the socialism of Cahan and of the Forverts, of his son, and of his late older brother, the Yiddish author Israel J. Singer (ibid., 30).

100. See Peter C. Herman, “‘Shadows on the Hudson’: Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Problem of Post-Holocaust Judaism,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 24 (2005): 178n28. Sanford Kessler also believes that the novel shows a moral criticism of America, see “Shadows on the Hudson: Isaac Bashevis Singer on the Prospects for Faith and Virtue in Modern America,” The Review of Politics (Summer, 2007): 431–46.

101. Some of these arguments (especially those between fathers and sons) echoed the debates Singer had with his estranged Israeli son, Israel Zamir, who came to visit his father for the first time in New York in 1955 (Zamir was then in his mid-twenties). In his memoirs, Zamir attributes the tense relationship he had then with his father to their very different politics: “I couldn't stand the fact that my father was also a reactionary. The barrier between us seemed to have become impenetrable. … He was a capitalist, and I was a socialist. He was a luftmensch living on air, and I was a fisherman who lived on the kibbutz by the sweat of my brow. … It didn't look as if the gap that separated [our worlds] could ever be bridged.” Zamir, Journey to My Father, 30–31.

102. Hadda, Janet, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 137Google Scholar. Singer is quoted saying “conservative governments … have handled Jews no worse than liberal governments.” See also Joseph Sherman, “Translating ‘Shotns Baym Hodson’ (‘Shadows on the Hudson’): Directly Encountering Isaac Bashevis Singer's Authorial Dualism,” in Isaac Bashevis Singer: His Work and His World, ed. Hugh Denman, IJS Studies in Judaica (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 49–80.

103. Yitskhok Varshavski, “Vos trakht khaver Oren in tfise?,” Forverts, November 29, 1952, 2.

104. Ibid. This is just one example of many of how Singer used his remarkable rhetorical force to lash out against the involvement of Jews in progressive politics. See also Yitskhok Varshavski, “Far vos komunizm iz gegen idish?” [Why is Communism against Yiddish?], Forverts, February 25, 1960, 4.

105. Von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm, 31–42.

106. I. B. Singer, “Di ‘politishe ekonomye’ fun chelm,” Forverts, March 10, 1966. I would like to thank Ruth von Bernuth and Emma Woelk for the reference. Here I disagree with Bernuth, who repeats the notion that Singer was a nonideological author, who “does satirize communism” in his Yiddish Chelm stories, but nevertheless leaves “the impression that he is less eager to champion any one side than to voice a pervasive pessimism.” Von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm, 32–33. I see his pessimism as indistinguishable from his conservatism.

107. Singer, Shadows on the Hudson, 144.

108. Ibid., 6.

109. Ibid., 24.

110. Ibid.

111. Ibid., 28.

112. Ibid., 59.

113. Ibid., 51.

114. Boris's Hebrew name, Mordechai, alludes that he is an incarnation of the prototypical Enlighted Jew, who was often called Markus (the German version of Mordechai) in Haskalah literature. Boris's enlightened traditionalism, along with his worldly business skills, gives his character an extra layer of symbolism, representing an ideal of Jewish integration in Western societies.

115. Ibid., 50.

116. Ibid., 171.

117. Ibid., 392.

118. Ibid., 222–3, 446–7.

119. Ibid., 401.

120. Ibid., 252; see also 314 and 431.

121. Ibid., 285.

122. Ibid., 286 and 459.

123. Ibid., 379.

124. See Sorin, Gerald. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 131–33Google Scholar; and Howe, Irving, A Margin of Hope (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 262–63Google Scholar.

125. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Irving Howe, “Yiddish Tradition vs. Jewish Tradition,” Mid-stream, June–July 1973, 34–35.

126. Alexander, Jewish Idea and Its Enemies, 56. Alexander notes that the lack of attention is related to Singer's lefty-liberal readers’ “incapacity to take conservative ideas seriously.” However, we saw that for her own purposes, the neoconservative Wisse has also at times presented Singer as nonideological.

127. Singer and Howe, “Yiddish Tradition vs. Jewish Tradition,” 36; also partially quoted in Sorin, Irving Howe, 132.

128. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Meaning of Freedom (West Point, NY: United States Military Academy, 1981), 1.

129. Ibid., 6.

130. Singer's negative view toward Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union in a nonliterary text is reflected in his review article for Commentary of the Soviet Yiddish almanac Sovyetish heymland; see Isaac Bashevis Singer, “A New Use for Yiddish,” Commentary, March 1962, 267–69.

131. Singer, Meaning of Freedom, 1.

132. Ibid., 6.

133. Singer and Howe, “Yiddish Tradition vs. Jewish Tradition,” 36–37. Sabbatai Zvi was a leader of a messianic movement in the seventeenth century. In his novel Satan in Goray, Singer equates the belief in Sabbatai Zvi with a belief in Stalin.