UPDATE: BUSH HONORS OZICK, PIPES, WISSE AND OTHERS

The 2007 National Humanities Medal (Contentions)

Today, President Bush has awarded the National Humanities Medal to a number of important contributors to American intellectual life. We’re delighted to say that five of the honorees have close ties with COMMENTARY: military historian Victor Davis Hanson, the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, Russia scholar Richard Pipes, Harvard professor of Yiddish literature Ruth R. Wisse, and Roger Hertog, a distinguished patron of the humanities and a longtime supporter of COMMENTARY. We’ve made available free of charge some of the major items written by the honorees.

Victor Davis Hanson
Iraq’s Future—and Ours (January 2004)
Goodbye to Europe (October 2002)

Cynthia Ozick
The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination (March 1999)
Envy; or, Yiddish in America (November 1969)

Richard Pipes
Life, Liberty, Property (March 1999)
Russia’s Chance (March 1992)

Ruth R. Wisse
At Home in Jerusalem (April 2003)
Yiddish: Past, Present, Imperfect (November 1997)

Five Jews awarded humanities medal (JTA)
Five Jews were among the winners of the National Humanities Medal.

They were among nine Americans and a preservation group who were honored with the award this year by President Bush. The White House named the awardees on Wednesday.

The Jewish winners are Stephen Balch of Princeton, N.J., the president of the National Association of Scholars, and a prominent critic of perceived liberal bias on American campuses; Roger Hertog of New York,a philanthropist and one of the principal backers of the New York Sun; Cynthia Ozick of New Rochelle, N.Y., a novelist whose literary preoccupation has been Jewish history; Ruth Wisse of Cambridge, Mass., considered the pre-eminent Yiddishist of modern times; and Richard Pipes of Cambridge, Mass., a Russian history scholar noted for his anti-Soviet activism. Pipes is also the father of Daniel Pipes, a noted conservative writer on Middle East issues.

Also named was the Monuments Men Foundation, which preserves and restores arts and monuments damaged during World War II. It is a lead group in recovering Jewish-owned art stolen by the Nazis.

The White House also named the National Medal of Arts recipients. They include Roy Neuberger of New York City, an arts patron who was born Jewish but now renounces any religion. His son, however, is a practicing Jew.