Over the past four decades Ruth R. Wisse has been a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies in North America, and one of our most fearless public intellectuals on issues relating to Jewish society, culture, and politics. In this celebratory volume, edited by four of her former students, Wisse’s colleagues take as a starting point her award-winning book The Modern Jewish Canon (2000) and explore an array of topics that touch on aspects of Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.

Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon brings together writers both seasoned and young, from both within and beyond the academy, to reflect the diversity of Wisse’s areas of expertise and reading audiences. The volume also includes a translation of one of the first modern texts on the question of Jewish literature, penned in 1888 by Sholem Aleichem, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of Wisse’s scholarship. In its richness and heft, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon itself constitutes an important scholarly achievement in the field of modern Jewish literature.

Introduction
The editors
I. Making a Canon
Writing Jewish
Hillel Halkin
Knocking on Heaven's Gate: Hebrew Literature and Wisse's Canon
Alan Mintz
Holocaust Literature: Foreshadowings and Shadowings 
David Aberbach
Of Jews and Canons: Further Thoughts
Ilan Stavans
A Jewish Artistic Canon
Ezra Mendelsohn
Judging the Judgment of Shomer, Or Arguing the Borders of the Modern Jewish Canon
Justin Cammy
The Judgment of Shomer
Sholem Aleichem (translated and annotated by Justin Cammy)
II. Elaborations: Reading Wisse's Canonical Authors
Daniel Deronda: The Zionist Fate in English Hands; and the Liberal Betrayal of the 
Jews
Edward Alexander
The Pleasure of Disregarding Red Lights: A Reading of Sholem Aleichem's Monologue 
"A Nisref" (Burned Out)
Dan Miron
The Hershele Maze: Isaac Babel and His Ghost Reader
Sasha Senderovich
The Open Suitcases: Yankev Glatshteyn's Ven Yash Iz Gekumen
Avraham Novershtern
Seductions and Disputations: Pseudo-Dialogues in the Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Miriam Udel-Lambert
Gimpel the Simple and on Reading from Right to Left
David G. Roskies
Isaac Bashevis Singer's Short Story "Androgynous"
Suzanne Klingenstein
Building Bridges Destined to Fall: Biological and Literary Paternity in Appelfeld's The 
Ice Mine
Philip Hollander
Life/Writing: Aharon Appelfeld's Autobiographical Work and the Modern Jewish Canon
Naomi B. Sokoloff
Henry Roth, Hebrew, and the Unspeakable
Hana Wirth-Nesher
The Modern Hero as Schlemiel: The Swede in Philip Roth's American Pastoral
Michael Kimmage
III. Conversations: Across Canons and Between Texts
Innovation by Translation: Yiddish as a Dybbuk in Hebrew Literary History
Ken Frieden
Creating Yiddish Dialogue for the "First Modern Yiddish Comedy"
Marion Aptroot
The Smoke of Civilization: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 
Sh. Y. Abramovitsh's Di Klyatshe
Marc Caplan
Yiddish Canon Consciousness and the Dionysiac Spirit of Music
Jed Wyrick
Joyce's Yiddish: Modernism, Translation, and the Jews
Rachel Rubinstein
The Transmission of Poetic Anger: an Unexploded Shell in the Jewish Canon
Janet Hadda
Guilt, Mourning, Idol Worship, and Golem Writing:
The Symptoms of a Jewish Literary Canon
Emily Miller Budick
IV. Interventions: Expanding Wisse's Canon
What's So Funny About the Yiddish Theater? Comedy and the Origins of Yiddish Drama 
Jeremy Dauber
Naked Truths: Avraham Goldfaden's Der Fanatik, Oder, Di Tsvey Kuni Lemlekh
Alyssa Quint
Memory of Metaphor: Meir Wiener's Novel Kolev Ashkenazi As Critique of The 
Jewish Historical Imagination
Mikhail Krutikov
Shmuel Nadler's Besht-Simfonye: at the Limits of Orthodox Literature
Beatrice Lang Caplan
Chava Rosenfarb and The Tree of Life
Goldie Morgentaler 
Fiddles on Willow Trees: The Missing Polish Link in the Jewish Canon
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
The Kvetcher in the Rye: J D Salinger and Challenges to the Modern Jewish Canon
Leah Garrett
Israeli Identity in a Post-Zionist Age
Yaron Peleg
V. Writers, Critics, and Canons
Bellow's Canon
Jonathan Rosen
The Eicha Problem
Dara Horn
The Great Explainer
Cynthia Ozick
VI. Ruth Wisse Bibliography
Justin Cammy and Debi Caplan
Acknowledgments and Permissions
 It is no coincidence that Ruth Wisse, in recounting her early intellectual models, 
cites a rabbinic tradition of disputation and discussion. It is no coincidence, 
either, that the subject under discussion in this model of argument is the founding 
moment of Jewish peoplehood, the exodus from Egypt, for Wisse has devoted 
her career to a passionate conversation with minds past and present on the art 
and destiny of 'am yisrael. And yet Wisse demonstrates her ease and passion in 
both a Jewish and American tradition of argument as, in the next breath, she 
adds, "Edmund Wilson [was] then my ideal intellectual." It would be inaccurate to 
say that these two statements are a reflection of an intellectual with a foot in 
"both worlds." The truth is far more dynamic: Wisse is a thinker whose work and 
world is all of a piece, a lifelong demonstration of the indispensability of Jewish 
life to the existence of creative civilization, and of the necessity of creative 
civilization to the existence of Jewish life.
Wisse's first critical work, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971), which traced 
the evolution of a Jewish folk type across Yiddish and American culture, was her 
first sustained attempt in writing to argue for the centrality of Jewish creative 
expression to Western civilization. At the same time, early in her university 
career, she transformed McGill University's English department by introducing 
Yiddish language and literature courses into the regular curriculum. "In proposing 
to teach Jewish literature," she would later recall, "I argued that an expanded 
humanities curriculum would broaden the university's coverage of Western 
culture, legitimating the university's claim to be teaching Western, rather than 
Christian, civilization."
In a moment when the ascendant ethos of many humanities departments is a 
severe critique of Western culture, and even its outright rejection, it might be 
difficult to see just how radical Wisse's project was. It has inspired students and 
colleagues, and has provided the animating energy for the wide array of 
intellectual and scholarly endeavors she has undertaken for the last several 
decades. Breadth of knowledge; of literature, intellectual history and Jewish 
history; enrich her tightly focused book on Yiddish author and intellectual I. L. 
Peretz (I.L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 1991), while A 
Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988) has become required reading for anyone 
hoping to appreciate not just the works of American Yiddish poets Mani Leyb and 
Moyshe Leyb Halpern, but the astonishingly vibrant creative and intellectual life 
of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the first decades of the twentieth century. 
These works, as well as the curricular transformations she encouraged and 
implemented at McGill and later Harvard University, would in turn necessitate her 
work as a translator and anthologizer. That is to say, her scholarship inspired 
increasing numbers of students to explore Yiddish literature, but few texts were 
available in translation. Thus Wisse has served as editor or co-editor of The Best 
of Sholem Aleichem, The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, A Shtetl and 
Other Yiddish Novellas, The I.L. Peretz Reader, and a soon-to-be published 
edition of Yankev Glatshteyn's novels. Examplars of meticulous translation on 
levels both linguistic and cultural, these anthologies provide lay readers reliable 
access to works that resist the sentimentalization of Jewish Eastern Europe. A 
Shtetl and other Yiddish Novellas is a case in point. Compiled as a result of a 
course she taught at McGill on Yiddish literature in translation, which attracted 
students "whose curiosity exhausted the available materials and left us wishing 
for more," A Shtetl offers translations of masterworks by writers as different in 
artistic temperament as S.Y. Abramovitsh is from David Bergelson and Sh. 
Anski. In her anthology, the shtetl is revealed as an evolving and constantly 
shifting imagined homeland, where political engagement and cultural conflict play 
themselves out against the backdrop of dissolving tradition. 
 The Modern Jewish Canon is a culmination of Wisse's anthologizing drive, which 
we can understand as a continuation of the Jewish cultural project that H. N. 
Bialik called kinus, or "ingathering:" the bringing together of literary treasures in 
such a way that a new generation can find further meaning in them. This is not 
even to mention Wisse's voluminous output of literary and critical essays (still to 
be collected in one volume) which have probed the work of many of the most 
significant Yiddish, American-Jewish, and Hebrew writers of the last century. Of 
increasing sociological and historical significance, Wisse's autobiographical 
essays record her coming of age in Montreal, in a milieu infused in particular by 
her mother's Yiddishist life in Vilna that had been cut short by the war, and where 
prominent Yiddish intellectuals were part of the landscape; Melech Ravitch 
attended Passover Seders, for instance, and none other than the great Yiddish 
poet Abraham Sutzkever would urge her toward her career as a Yiddish scholar.