How to Save the Jewish People

[singing] Hope for the best.

Expect the worst.

Some drink champagne.

Some die of thirst.

No way of knowing which way it's going.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Hope for the best.

Welcome to this special edition of the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast.

I am Jon Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine, and I am delighted to welcome today Commentary's five-decade-long contributor, uh, one of the foremost Yiddishists in the United States, the Western world, professor, longtime professor at McGill and at Harvard, uh, and author of numerous books on the subject of Jewry, Zionism, America, and power.

I'm talking about Ruth Wisse, who is here in large measure to discuss the reissue of her 1992 book, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews.

And we begin this conversation at a very interesting moment because we are in the wake of a race here in New York City, where you and I both live, between two Jewish antagonists for a seat in Congress, Brad Lander and, uh, Daniel Goldman.

A race won by Brad Lander, an American Jew, against Daniel Goldman, an American Jew, with its issue largely being the purported evil or wrongdoing of Daniel Goldman in not being, as Brad Lander is, an anti-Zionist Jew.

Your book, published in 1992, I don't think could have foreseen, and did not foresee specifically anything as confrontationally obvious, uh, as, as a means of proving your thesis that, uh, there is a liberal betrayal of the Jews in which the Jews themselves might well be considered active participants.

But given this result, and given what we have seen, this, I guess, provides us with the explanation for why the reissue of your book is so important at this moment.