Elie Wiesel at 80

BU celebrates as Nobel laureate enters his ninth decade

By Tricia Brick

Elie Wiesel — an internationally recognized human rights activist, the author of the seminal Holocaust memoir Night, and BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities — turns 80 today, Tuesday, September 30, on the first full day of the Jewish New Year. In an interview with the New York Times earlier this week, Wiesel (Hon.'74) said that the birthday itself is not of great significance to him; rather, each year since his release from a concentration camp has been cause for quiet celebration. “In truth," he said, "when I entered Auschwitz I never thought I would leave it alive.”

The Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University is holding an international conference in honor of Wiesel from Sunday, October 26, to Tuesday, October 28. Participants will discuss the major areas of Wiesel’s life work, including his writings on subjects ranging from the Bible and Hasidism to the Holocaust and the State of Israel, as well as his human rights efforts on behalf of oppressed peoples throughout the world. Wiesel will give his annual lecture on Monday, October 27, at 8 p.m. in the George Sherman Union's Metcalf Hall, 775 Commonwealth Ave., as he has for more than 30 years. The event will be Wiesel's only lecture at Boston University this year.

All lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required; a schedule and ticket information can be found at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Web site.

A look inside Wiesel's classroom, originally published in Bostonia, appears below.

Teaching Against Indifference

Classes with Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, a professor at BU for over three decades, are lessons in literature — and in the power of compassion

On a sunny September afternoon, the members of Elie Wiesel's Literature of Memory course are struggling with a sticky ethical question: is it OK to choose a sinner to lead a nation? After a half-hour or so of discussion about Robert Alter's translation of the biblical story of David, the class has reached an apparent contradiction: David was a flawed individual, yet he was chosen by God as king of Israel. "Is it possible that God chose a sinner — really consciously, deliberately, a sinner to be his servant?" asks Wiesel.

Students in turn respond thoughtfully, often drawing connections between the text and their own experience. One notes that the text describes David as powerfully charismatic. "Perhaps God was drawn to him as well," he suggests.

Another sees a way to connect personally with the characters in the text: "All of us have sinned at one time or another, so we can identify with David."

Wiesel stands at the front of the seminar room, his hands clasped behind his back. He listens with great concentration, his dark eyes focused on the student who is speaking, now and then encouraging her with a nod or a half-smile. From time to time, in a voice so quiet that the class leans forward to hear, he echoes a student's response, helping to clarify the ideas in the context of the discussion: "As you said, any one of us is capable of committing a sin, and therefore it is up to us to change sin into virtue." His concise eloquence reflects his belief that every word is precious.

Another student raises her hand. She notes that David's great-grandmother Ruth was a Moabite — a non-Israelite and therefore an outsider — and that David was not first-born. "God was carrying out his purposes through people who were otherwise excluded," she says.

Although the students are exploring a question raised directly by the text, their responses speak to the overarching lessons of Wiesel's teaching, which goes beyond the typical study of symbols, motifs, and themes. The intimate explorations of characters' histories and motivations, students say, help them learn compassion: as they imagine the lives of characters who lived in different times and faraway places, they learn to identify with the living people who inhabit other countries or belong to unfamiliar cultures. The respect he shows those he teaches makes them feel empowered — and even responsible — to better the world in some way. By listening closely to his students, they say, he models sensitivity to others' needs and points of view. And in his stories about his own past, students find hope.

"I remember Elie Wiesel relayed a story: during the Holocaust, observant Jews decided to put God on trial for allowing this to happen," recalls Paul Minor (CAS'85). "In this concentration camp they put God on trial, and they found God guilty of abandoning them, allowing this unspeakable horror to happen. And after the trial was over, they said evening prayer."

Stories and questions — these are Wiesel's tools in a pedagogy his teaching assistant Ariel Burger (UNI'08) calls "an ethical teaching against indifference."

"Once you hear these stories, you can't see life the same again," says Deborah Katchko Gray (SED'79).

The power of the story

Elie Wiesel has many roles. A Nobel laureate, he received the peace prize in 1986 for his humanitarian work. He is a witness, a Holocaust survivor who has devoted his life to preserving the memory of that event and to speaking for those who are voiceless. He is a scholar and the author of more than 40 books, including the 1960 memoir Night, considered a seminal volume on the experience of the Holocaust and recently republished in a best-selling edition. An activist, he works in the service of disenfranchised and threatened peoples worldwide. He has traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah, testified with George Clooney in support of the African victims of genocide in Darfur. But when Wiesel appeared before the United Nations Security Council in September 2006, he introduced himself by saying simply, "I'm a writer and I'm a teacher. That is my profession, my vocation."

Since 1976, Wiesel has taught at Boston University as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, University Professor, and professor of philosophy and religion in the College of Arts and Sciences. He teaches two courses a year under the general title The Literature of Memory, but the reading list and subtopics change each year; this year's courses are Faith and Power in Ancient and Modern Literature and The Book of Job. Wiesel makes clear to his students that they are a priority to him; for example, he encourages every one to meet with him for a one-on-one conversation. Yet as he approaches 80 years of age his agenda remains filled with international activism, "actually accomplishing something that helps people in quantifiable ways," as Burger says. To those who know his schedule, it's no surprise that he has flown to Boston for his Monday morning class from meetings with world leaders in Washington, Israel, or Africa.

Students say they are inspired, too, by the faith in humanity he maintains despite the horrors he witnessed and endured. Wiesel and his family were deported to Auschwitz from their home in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania, when he was 15. His parents, Shlomo and Sarah, and his youngest sister, Tzipora, died in the camps. But Elie Wiesel survived, and after Buchenwald was liberated, he became a writer — a journalist in France and in the United States — and then a teacher. He views the study of literature as essential. "Literature may be the poetic memory of humanity," he explains. "It is the power of the story: we see the tale and we don't even realize the tale has entered us and has had an impact on our decisions, on our dreams, on our ambitions, our hopes."

Many of his students have found that impact to be transformative. "He's made me reconsider my sociopolitical stance just in the short time I've known him — I've begun to question my intellectual detachment, my proud academic neutrality when it comes to politics," notes Terence Renaud (CAS'07), a senior history major in Wiesel's Faith and Power course.

"I've always been a humanist, but he's made me consider becoming a humanitarian as well."

"Everything was shaped by him," says Janet McCord (UNI'95), who directs the Edwin S. Shneidman Program in Thanatology at Marian College — work inspired, in part, by the dissertation she wrote as Wiesel's Ph.D. student about Holocaust survivors who committed suicide. "Once you study with someone like Wiesel, you try to look at the world the way he does; you try to make sure you make an impact on that world, that you better it."

But what does a literature course have to teach future doctors, lawyers, religious leaders, and artists about how to make their way in the world? His students seem to learn from Wiesel's courses the lessons they as individuals most need to hear. Geoffrey Rubin (CAS'07), a premed senior in the Faith and Power course, says Wiesel has taught him that "literature is really a reflection of our society; it reflects all the feelings and ideas and aspects of a person, so you can put yourself in his shoes. It's important for a doctor to be able to imagine the world of his patients, and that's one thing that Elie Wiesel has taught me: to feel compassion for others and to care for those you don't see, those who are disadvantaged but whom you may not know. He sensitizes his students to feel like they have a real responsibility in the world."

Wiesel has great faith in the potential of those he teaches. "I really want my students, 20 years later, when they become important persons — socially, economically, humanly — whenever they will have to make a decision, the decision will be influenced by what they have learned in class," he says.

Painter Shelley Adler (CFA'87) says she found in Wiesel's courses a new way to look at her art: "that every mark, every gesture, makes a difference." And Deborah Katchko Gray, whose office walls are covered with framed photographs and articles featuring Wiesel, was one of the first women cantors to serve full-time in a conservative synagogue in this country. "I think I got the courage to be a pioneer because of my studies with Elie Wiesel," she says, "because I saw the risks people took just to be Jewish, just to live."

"Professor Wiesel bridges the big ideas and questions and profound literatures of life in various traditions, religious and secular, traditional and modern. And he bridges all of that with very real questions about making the world a better place," Burger says. "Tachlis, we say in Hebrew and Yiddish. Tachlis is like, okay, so you're in the university, you're thinking a lot about things, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to help people in Darfur? And on the other hand, if you're only involved in activism, but you don't have any kind of life of the mind or the spirit or the heart, if you don't have any internal life, you can dry out and become a robot."

In his classroom on Bay State Road, Wiesel continues to push his students, encouraging them to go deeper into the character of David. Why was this man chosen by God despite his sins? "There's one thing indisputable about him that works in his favor," he says. "What is it?"

"The poem he wrote?" one student asks.

"Ah, if poetry were such a virtue," Wiesel says with a wry smile, then gives another hint. "It's something that accompanied him his entire life."

"Loyalty," another student suggests, providing a few supporting examples from the text.

Wiesel listens, nods. Perhaps that is part of it. But there is another answer: "It was his passion for learning."

That learning can be redemptive is one of Wiesel's most deeply held beliefs. "What I try to give to my students is my passion, that they should share that passion, the passion for learning," he says later. "Learning has never hurt people. People who believe in learning don't hate one another. It's a remedy against hatred, any learning — poetry of the 17th century, philosophy of the 19th century — but learning together. I come from a Jewish tradition, which is learning together. When I was in my teens, together with a friend. Always two, a pair. Through the most complicated texts, together."

"For Professor Wiesel the learning process involves very profound respect and very deep listening and asking questions," Burger says. "He's really focused on questions rather than answers, and that opens people up. People are willing to stay in that space of not-knowing: I don't know what the answer is; this is the edge of my thinking. And I'm going to put the edge of my thinking together with the edge of your thinking and see what happens. So it feels like an adventure."

The original version of this story appeared in the Winter 2006–2007 issue of Bostonia.

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