Ruth R. Wisse (born Ruth Roskies on May 13, 1936, in Vienna, Austria) is a distinguished Canadian-American academic, literary critic, scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literature, and political activist. Born to Jewish parents who fled Nazi persecution, she immigrated to Canada as an infant and was raised in a Yiddish-speaking immigrant community in Montreal, Quebec. She earned a B.A. (1957) and M.A. from McGill University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University (1969). After teaching at McGill and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she joined Harvard University in 1978 as the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, retiring as professor emerita in 2014. She is a prominent conservative scholar, a leading scholar of Jewish literature and politics known for her analyses of antisemitism and modern Jewish culture, and a distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her scholarly work includes translations and critical analyses of Yiddish authors like Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Avrom Sutzkever, and seminal books such as 'The Schlemiel as Modern Hero' (1971), 'Jews and Power' (2011), and 'No Joke: Making Jewish Humor' (2013). A committed Zionist and critic of anti-Semitism, she writes on Jewish political thought and culture, contributing to publications like Commentary, The New Republic, and Mosaic. She hosts the Stories Jews Tell podcast. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and continues to lecture on contemporary Jewish issues.