SOURCE CITATION
"Elie Wiesel." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 54. Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Author of over forty novels, plays, collections of short stories, lectures, and philosophical texts, Elie Wiesel has been called the poet of the Holocaust. His literature, noted Jack Kolbert in Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, "most of which he wrote in French, is rooted in the horror of the Holocaust and devoted to the examination of the most fundamental moral issues." Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor, once wrote, "The only role I sought was that of witness. I believed that, having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to that survival, to justify each moment of my life." In works such as The Night Trilogy, The Town beyond the Wall, The Gates of the Forest, A Beggar in Jerusalem, The Oath, The Fifth Son, The Testament, The Forgotten, and The Judges, Wiesel has explored the Holocaust both directly and indirectly, searching for root causes as well as its effects on succeeding generations. Additionally, in his two-part autobiography, All the Rivers Run to the Sea as well as And The Sea Is Never Full, Wiesel reveals the private man in the context of his times. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his work on behalf of victims around the world. Accepting the prize, Wiesel reminded the audience that the world cannot remain silent "when human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy. . . . Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must--at that moment--become the center of the universe."

From Romania to Auschwitz
In the spring of 1944, the Nazis entered the Transylvanian village of Sighet, Romania, until then a relatively safe and peaceful enclave in the middle of a war-torn continent. Arriving with orders to exterminate an estimated 600,000 Jews in six weeks or less, Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Gestapo's Jewish section, began making arrangements for a mass deportation program. Among those forced to leave their homes was fifteen-year-old Elie Wiesel, the only son of a grocer and his wife. A serious and devoted student of the Talmud and the mystical teachings of Hasidism and the Cabala, the young man had always assumed he would spend his entire life in Sighet, quietly contemplating the religious texts and helping out in the family's store from time to time. Instead, along with his father, mother, and three sisters, Wiesel was herded onto a train bound for Birkenau, the reception center for the infamous death camp Auschwitz.

For reasons he still finds impossible to comprehend, Wiesel survived Birkenau and later Auschwitz and Buna and Buchenwald; his father, mother, and youngest sister did not (he did not learn until after the war that his older sisters also survived). With nothing and no one in Sighet for him to go back to, Wiesel boarded a train for Belgium with four hundred other orphans who, like him, had no reason or desire to return to their former homes. On orders of General Charles de Gaulle, head of the French provisional government after World War II, the train was diverted to France, where border officials asked the children to raise their hands if they wanted to become French citizens. As Wiesel (who at that time neither spoke nor understood French) recalls in the Washington Post, "A lot of them did. They thought they were going to get bread or something; they would reach out for anything. I didn't, so I remained stateless."

A Witness's Testament
Wiesel chose to stay in France for a while, settling first in Normandy and later in Paris, doing whatever he could to earn a living: tutoring, directing a choir, translating. Eventually he began working as a reporter for various French and Jewish publications. But he could not quite bring himself to write about what he had seen and felt at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Doubtful of his--or of anyone's--ability to convey the horrible truth without diminishing it, Wiesel vowed never to make the attempt.

The young journalist's self-imposed silence came to an end in the mid-1950s, however, after he met and interviewed the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Francois Mauriac. Deeply moved upon learning of Wiesel's tragic youth, Mauriac urged him to speak out and tell the world of his experiences, to "bear witness" for the millions of men, women, and children whom death, and not despair, had silenced. The result was Night, the story of a teen-age boy plagued with guilt for having survived the camps and devastated by the realization that the God he had once worshipped so devoutly allowed his people to be destroyed. For the most part autobiographical, it was, noted Richard M. Elman in the New Republic, "a document as well as a work of literature--journalism which emerged, coincidentally, as a work of art."

Wiesel expresses what Commonweal's Irving Halpern called "the anguish of a survivor who is unable to exorcise the past or to live with lucidity and grace in the present" in the book Night, his first attempt to bear witness for the dead. Wiesel wrote: "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky." He continued, "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

Described by the Nation's Daniel Stern as "undoubtedly the single most powerful literary relic of the holocaust," Night is the first in a series of nonfiction books and autobiographical novels this "lyricist of lamentation" has written that deal, either directly or indirectly, with the Holocaust. "He sees the present always refracted through the prism of these earlier days," commented James Finn in the New Republic. The New York Times's Thomas Lask stated: "For more than twenty-five years, Elie Wiesel has been in one form or another a witness to the range, bestiality, and completeness of the destruction of European Jewry by the Germans. . . . Auschwitz informs everything he writes--novels, legends, dialogues. He is not belligerent about it, only unyielding. Nothing he can say measures up to the enormity of what he saw, what others endured. The implications these experiences have for mankind terrify him. . . . He is part conscience, part quivering needle of response and part warning signal. His writing is singular in the disparate elements it has unified, in the peculiar effect of remoteness and immediacy it conveys. He is his own mold."

After international publication and acclaim of Night, Wiesel migrated to the United States, settling on the East Coast. There he continued writing as well as teaching, both at the City College of the City University of New York and at Boston University. Other novels by Wiesel about the Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust include Dawn and The Accident, which were later published together with Night in The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident. Like Night, the other two books in the trilogy have concentration camp survivors as their central characters. Dawn concerns the experiences of one survivor, just after World War II, who joins the Jewish underground efforts to form an independent Israeli state; and The Accident is about a man who discovers that his collision with an automobile was actually caused by his subconscious, guilt-ridden desire to commit suicide.

Novels of Moral Scrutiny
Wiesel explores the sin of silence in The Town beyond the Wall, about a citizen who watches the Jews of his town led through the streets to a train which will take them to a concentration camp. All the while, this spectator says and does nothing in protest. With The Gates of the Forest, Wiesel further explores Holocaust themes with "his most penetrating analysis of the relationship between people suffering through the Holocaust and their God," according to Kolbert. That same critic felt that Wiesel's next novel, A Beggar in Jerusalem, "may be, along with La Nuit, [Wiesel's] most successful literary undertaking to date." The award-winning novel is a fictional recreation of the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states. Wiesel's 1973 novel, The Oath, is, according to Kolbert, "an epic narrative," dealing again with the theme of silence. Though not directly about the Holocaust, that novel also investigates the theme of slaughtered Jews and genocide.

In two of Wiesel's later novels, The Testament and The Fifth Son, the author also explores the effects of the Holocaust on the next generation of Jews. Some critics such as Globe and Mail contributor Bronwyn Drainie have questioned the validity of the author's belief that children of Holocaust survivors would be "as morally galvanized by the Nazi nightmare as the survivors themselves." But, asserted Richard F. Shepard in the New York Times, even if the feelings of these children cannot be generalized, "the author does make all of us 'children' of that generation, all of us who were not there, in the sense that he outlines for us the burdens of guilt, of revenge, of despair."

The Writer as More than Wordsmith
Indeed, the Holocaust and the Jewish religious and philosophical tradition involve experiences and beliefs shared by a great many people, including other writers. But as Kenneth Turan declared in the Washington Post Book World, Elie Wiesel has become "much more than just a writer. He is a symbol, a banner, and a beacon, perhaps the survivor of the Holocaust. . . . He seems to own the horror of the death camps, or, rather, the horror owns him." But it is a moral and spiritual, not a physical, horror that obsesses Wiesel and obliges him to compose what Dan Isaac of the Nation called "an angry message to God, filled with both insane rage and stoical acceptance; calculated to stir God's wrath, but careful not to trigger an apocalypse." Explained Isaac's Nation colleague Laurence Goldstein: "For Elie Wiesel memory is an instrument of revelation. Each word he uses to document the past transforms both the work and the memory into an act of faith. The writings of Elie Wiesel are a journey into the past blackened by the Nazi death camps where the charred souls of its victims possess the sum of guilt and endurance that mark the progress of man. It is a compulsive, fevered, single-minded search among the ashes for a spark that can be thrust before the silent eyes of God himself."

Unlike those who dwell primarily on the physical horror, then, Wiesel writes from the perspective of a passionately religious man whose faith has been profoundly shaken by what he has witnessed. As Goldstein remarked, "He must rediscover himself. . . . Although he has not lost God, he must create out of the pain and numbness a new experience that will keep his God from vanishing among the unforgettable faces of the thousands whose bodies he saw." According to Maurice Friedman of Commonweal, Wiesel is, in fact, "the most moving embodiment of the Modern Job": a man who questions--in books that "form one unified outcry, one sustained protest, one sobbing and singing prayer"--why the just must suffer while the wicked flourish. This debate with God is one of the central themes of what a Newsweek critic referred to as Wiesel's "God-tormented, God-intoxicated" fiction.

In addition to his intense preoccupation with ancient Jewish philosophy, mythology, and history, Wiesel displays a certain affinity with modern French existentialists, an affinity Josephine Knopp believed is a direct consequence of the Holocaust. Knopp wrote in Contemporary Literature: "To the young Wiesel the notion of an 'absurd' universe would have been a completely alien one. . . . The traditional Jewish view holds that life's structure and meaning are fully explained and indeed derive from the divinely granted Torah. . . . Against this background the reality of Auschwitz confronts the Jew. . . . The only possible response that remains within the framework of Judaism is denunciation of God and a demand that He fulfill His contractual obligation [to protect those who worship Him]." In a more recent novel, Twilight, Wiesel explores this absurdity--in this case, he goes so far as to call it madness--of the universe. Again, the protagonist is a Jew, who begins to wonder, as New York Times reviewer John Gross explained, whether "it is mad to go on believing in God. Or perhaps . . . it is God who is mad: who else but a mad God could have created such a world?"

A Transcendental Literary Voice
The strong emphasis on Jewish tradition and Jewish suffering in Wiesel's works does not mean that he speaks only to and for Jews. In fact, maintained Robert McAfee Brown in Christian Century, "writing out of the particularity of his own Jewishness . . . is how [Wiesel] touches universal chords. He does not write about 'the human condition,' but about 'the Jewish condition.' Correction: in writing about the Jewish condition, he thereby writes about the human condition. For the human condition is not generalized existence; it is a huge, crazy-quilt sum of particularized existences all woven together."

To Stern, this time commenting in the Washington Post Book World, it seems that "Wiesel has taken the Jew as his metaphor--and his reality--in order to unite a moral and aesthetic vision in terms of all men." Manes Sperber of the New York Times Book Review expressed a similar view, stating that "Wiesel is one of the few writers who, without any plaintiveness, has succeeded in revealing in the Jewish tragedy those features by which it has become again and again a paradigm of the human condition."

According to Michael J. Bandler in the Christian Science Monitor, Wiesel conveys his angry message to God "with a force and stylistic drive that leaves the reader stunned." Concise and uncluttered, yet infused with a highly emotional biblical mysticism, the author's prose "gleams again and again with the metaphor of the poet," wrote Clifford A. Ridley in the National Observer. Though it "never abandons its tender intimacy," reported Sperber, "[Wiesel's] voice comes from far away in space and time. It is the voice of the Talmudic teachers of Jerusalem and Babylon; of medieval mystics; of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav whose tales have inspired generations of Hasidim and so many writers." As Lask observed, "[Wiesel] has made the form of the telling his own. The surreal and the supernatural combine abrasively with the harsh fact; the parable, the rabbinic tale support and sometimes substitute for narrative. The written law and oral tradition support, explain and expand the twentieth-century event." Goldstein, noting the author's "remarkably compassionate tone," declared that "he writes with that possessive reverence for language that celebrates, as much as describes, experience. The written word becomes a powerful assertion, the triumph of life over death and indifference. . . . Words carved on gravestones, legend torn from the pit where millions of broken bodies lie. This is the inheritance which Elie Wiesel brings to us. His voice claims us with its urgency. His vision lights the mystery of human endurance."

Several critics, however, felt Wiesel's prose does not quite live up to the demands of his subject. Commenting in the New York Times Book Review, for example, Jeffrey Burke stated that the author occasionally "slips into triteness or purple prose or redundancy," and a reviewer for the New Yorker found that Wiesel becomes "nearly delirious" in his intensity. Newsweek's Geoffrey Wolff believed that Wiesel's work at times "suffers from unnecessary confusions, linguistic cliches, dense and purple thickets, and false mystifications. Ideas tend to hobble about . . . on stilts. . . . The language, seeking to transport us to another world, collapses beneath the weight of its burden much too often." Concluded Burke: "No one can or would deny the seriousness and necessity of Elie Wiesel's role as witness. . . . It is natural that such a mission would remain uppermost in the writer's mind, but that the requirements of art should proportionately diminish in significance is not an acceptable corollary. [Wiesel tends] to sacrifice the demands of craft to those of conscience."

In defense of Wiesel, Turan stated that "his is a deliberate, elegant style, consciously elevated and poetic, and if he occasionally tries to pack too much into a sentence, to jam it too full of significance and meaning, it is an error easy to forgive." Elman, this time writing in the New York Times Book Review, also found that "some of Wiesel's existentialist parables are deeply flawed by an opacity of language and construction, which may confirm that 'the event was so heavy with horror . . . that words could not really contain it.' But Wiesel's work is not diminished by his failure to make his shattering theme--God's betrayal of man--consistently explicit." Thus, according to Jonathan Brent in the Chicago Tribune Book World, Wiesel is "the type of writer distinguished by his subject rather than his handling of it. . . . Such writers must be read not for themselves but for the knowledge they transmit of events, personalities, and social conditions outside their fiction itself. They do not master their material esthetically, but remain faithful to it; and this constitutes the principle value of their work."

Few agree with these assessments of Wiesel's stylistic abilities, but many support Brent's conclusion that the author is almost compulsively faithful to his subject. As Lawrence L. Langer observed in the Washington Post Book World: "Although Elie Wiesel has announced many times in recent years that he is finished with the Holocaust as a subject for public discourse, it is clear . . . that the Holocaust has not yet finished with him. Almost from his first volume to his last, his writing has been an act of homage, a ritual of remembrance in response to a dreadful challenge 'to unite the language of man with the silence of the dead'. . . . If Elie Wiesel returns compulsively to the ruins of the Holocaust world, it is not because he has nothing new to say. . . . [It is simply that] the man he did not become besieges his imagination and compels him to confirm his appointments with the past that holds him prisoner."

Battling Forgetfulness
Concern that the truths of the Holocaust, and memories in general, might in time be forgotten has often fueled Wiesel's writing. In comparing his many works, Wiesel remarked to Publishers Weekly interviewer Elizabeth Devereaux, "What do they have in common? Their commitment to memory. What is the opposite of memory? Alzheimer's disease. I began to research this topic and I discovered that this is the worst disease, that every intellectual is afraid of this disease, not just because it is incurable, which is true of other diseases, too. But here the identity is being abolished." From this realization Wiesel created The Forgotten, a novel in which a Holocaust survivor fears he is losing his memories to an unnamed ailment. He beseeches his son to listen and remember as he recounts the events of his life. The dutiful son embarks for Romania to recover the details of his father's experience, including the death of his family at the hands of the Nazis and his role as an Eastern European partisan and freedom fighter for the establishment of Israel. Though Wiesel told Devereaux that this novel is "less autobiographical" than his others, The Forgotten contains recognizable allusions to his own life and work in references to the one-word titles of his first three novels and similarities between the father's childhood village and Wiesel's own. As Frederick Busch observed in the New York Times Book Review, Wiesel "intends to warn us that many of the survivors of the Holocaust are dying, that the cruel truth of the war against the Jews might one day be lost or clouded." Citing the author's "characteristic blend of petition, contemplative discourse, and devotion to Jewish tradition," Jonathan Dorfman wrote in a Chicago Tribune review, "The Forgotten is ample proof that . . . Wiesel remains a writer of significance and high merit."

Wiesel produced the first volume of his two-volume personal memoirs with All Rivers Run to the Sea, spanning the years from his childhood to the 1960s. He begins by recollecting the haunting premonition of a well-known rabbi which foretold the young Wiesel's future greatness, though it predicted that neither Wiesel nor his mother would live to know of his acclaim. In the reminiscence and anecdote that follows, Wiesel revisits his early village life, post-war orphanage and education in France, initiation as a professional journalist, and involvement in events surrounding the birth of Israel. As James E. Young noted in The New Leader, Wiesel devotes only twenty pages of the book to his concentration camp experiences. "Wiesel's memoir is not about what happened during those eleven months," Young wrote, "but about how they shaped his life afterward, how they have been remembered, how he has lived in their shadow." Despite Wiesel's confessed over-sensitivity to criticism and painful episodes of self-doubt, critics noted that his memoir reveals little about the author's personal life that is not evident in his previous works. Daphne Merkin wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "If the reader finishes this book with an impression that the public and private Elie Wiesel seem to dance around each other without ever really connecting, the author has foreseen this: 'Some see their work as a commentary on their life; for others it is the other way around. I count myself among the latter. Consider this account, then, as a kind of commentary.'" Wiesel concluded, as quoted by Vivian Gornick in the Nation, by writing, "The aim of the literature I call testimony is to disturb. I disturb the believer because I dare to put questions to God. I disturb the miscreant because I refuse to break with the religious and mystical universe that has shaped my own. Most of all, I disturb those who are comfortably settled within a system--be it political, psychological, or theological." Wiesel continued these memoirs with And the Sea Is Never Full, which picked up his story from where he left it off in the first volume in 1969 and "reveals himself as a surprisingly feisty, even combative personality who expresses his disappointments with some of the people he knew well," according to Kolbert. Such relationships included his relationship with the late president of France, Francois Mitterand.

Wiesel returned to the novel with The Judges, translated into English in 2002. In the book, five airplane passengers find themselves thrown together when their New York-to-Israel jet makes an emergency landing in northeastern United States. The passengers are taken in by various locals for the night and five are picked up by a man who identifies himself simply as "the Judge," who takes them to a lonely and remote rural house. He proceeds to ask each of the five penetrating questions about their existence as well as intimate details of their life. It is not clear if the five are prisoners or hostages or simply free to go whenever they want. But they do remember crucial events in their lives, sharing their stories with one another. Among the five is a theater producer, an aging woman's man, an Israeli soldier suffering from a deadly disease, a scholar, and finally the head of a Talmudic school in New York.

"What ultimately emerges from this ordeal is a triumph and affirmation of the power of love, honor, service, and faith in human life," wrote Patrick Sullivan in a Library Journal review. A Kirkus Reviews critic was less positive, noting that the ending "will seem convincing perhaps to few." Yet this same contributor also felt that ultimately that did not matter, for by the conclusion, Wiesel "will have entered the hearts, rewardingly, both of his characters and of his readers" Booklist's Hazel Rochman found this novel to be "part thriller, part Talmudic discussion, and part TV Survivor game." For a contributor to Publishers Weekly, the novel fits into Wiesel's work in "parables and fables." The same writer further noted, "There is a certain creakiness about the plot, reminiscent less of Sartre than of the Twilight Zone; the story seems more suited to the stage than the novel form. However, the authority of Wiesel's public persona always invests his writings with interest." And writing in Shofar, Alan L. Berger felt that the novel "continues and extends Wiesel's literary preoccupations." Berger further commented that Wiesel, "the theologian and moral philosopher, offers insights into memory, the keystone of his work; the nature of justice and repentance; the eternal struggle between evil and truth; and the relationship between God and time." For Berger, "Reading this intriguing novel is a compelling and challenging experience which inexorably draws the reader into the story."

Many years after Night, Wiesel is still torn between words and silence. "You must speak," he told a People magazine interviewer, "but how can you, when the full story is beyond language?" Furthermore, he once remarked in the Washington Post, "there is the fear of not being believed, . . . the fear that the experience will be reduced, made into something acceptable, perhaps forgotten." But as he went on to explain in People: "We [survivors] believe that if we survived, we must do something with our lives. The first task is to tell the tale." In short, concluded Wiesel, "The only way to stop the next holocaust--the nuclear holocaust--is to remember the last one. If the Jews were singled out then, in the next one we are all victims." In a New York Times article on Wiesel's winning of the 1986 Novel Peace Prize, James M. Markham quoted Egil Aarvik, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee: "Wiesel is a messenger to mankind. . . . His message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief . . . repeated and deepened through the works of a great author."

UPDATES
December 2003: Wiesel's book Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters was published by Schocken. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, December 22, 2003.

January 2006: Wiesel's book Night was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. Source: CNN, www.cnn.com, January 17, 2006.

November 30, 2006: Wiesel was awarded an honorary British knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, in recognition of his services to Holocaust education. Source: British Embassy Tel Aviv, www.britemb.org.il, January 19, 2007.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Romania; migrated to the United States, 1956, naturalized U.S. citizen, 1963; son of Shlomo (a grocer) and Sarah (Feig) Wiesel; married Marion Erster Rose, 1969; children: Shlomo Elisha. Education: Attended Sorbonne, University of Paris, 1948-51. Religion: Jewish. Addresses: Office: University Professors, Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215.; Agent: Georges Borchardt, 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

AWARDS
Prix Rivarol, 1963; Remembrance Award, 1965, for The Town beyond the Wall and all other writings; William and Janice Epstein Fiction Award, Jewish Book Council, 1965, for The Town beyond the Wall; Jewish Heritage Award, 1966, for excellence in literature; Prix Medicis, 1969, for Le Mendiant de Jerusalem; Prix Bordin, French Academy, 1972; Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Award, 1972; American Liberties Medallion, American Jewish Committee, 1972; Frank and Ethel S. Cohen Award, Jewish Book Council, 1973, for Souls on Fire; Martin Luther King, Jr., Award, City College of the City University of New York, 1973; Faculty Distinguished Scholar Award, Hofstra University, 1973-74; Joseph Prize for Human Rights, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1978; Zalman Shazar Award, State of Israel, 1979; Jabotinsky Medal, State of Israel, 1980; Prix Livre-International, 1980, and Prix des Bibliothecaires, 1981, both for Le Testament d'un poete juif assassine; Anatoly Scharansky Humanitarian Award, 1983; Congressional Gold Medal, 1984; humanitarian award, International League for Human Rights, 1985; Freedom Cup award, Women's League of Israel, 1986; Nobel Peace Prize, 1986; Special Christopher Book Award, 1987; achievement award, Artists and Writers for Peace in the Middle East, 1987; Profiles of Courage award, B'nai B'rith, 1987; Human Rights Law Award, International Human Rights Law Group, 1988; Presidential Medal, Hofstra University, 1988; Human Rights Law award, International Human Rights Law Group, 1988; Bicentennial medal, Georgetown University, 1988; Janus Korczak Humanitarian award, NAHE, Kent State University, 1989; Count Sforza award in Philanthropy Interphil, 1989; Lily Edelman award for Excellence in Continuing Jewish Education, B'nai B'rith International, 1989; George Washington award, American Hungarian Foundation, 1989; Bicentennial medal, New York University, 1989; Humanitarian award Human Rights Campaign Fund, 1989; International Brotherhood award, C.O.R.E., 1990; Frank Weil award for distinguished contribution to the advancement of North American Jewish culture, Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, 1990; 1st Raoul Wallenberg medal, University of Michigan, 1990; Award of Highest Honor, Soka University, 1991; Facing History and Ourselves Humanity award, 1991; La Medaille de la Ville de Toulouse, 1991; 5th Centennial Christopher Columbus medal, City of Genoa, 1992; 1st Primo Levi award, 1992; Literature Arts award, National Foundation for Jewish Culture, 1992; Ellis Island Medal of Honor, 1992; Guardian of the Children award, AKIM USA, 1992; Bishop Francis J. Mugavero award for religious and racial harmony, Queens College, 1994; Golden Slipper Humanitarian award, 1994; Interfaith Council on the Holocaust Humanitarian award, 1994; Crystal award, Davos World Economic Forum, 1995; First Niebuhr award, Elmhurst College, 1995; named Humanitarian of the Century, Council of Jewish Organizations; Freedom Award, National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN, 1995; Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement, 1996; Guardian of Zion Prize, Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, Bar-Ilan University, 1997; Canterbury Medalist, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, 1998; Yitzhak Rabin Peacemaker Award, Merrimack College, 1998; named Humanitarian of the Century, Council of Jewish Organizations, 1999; recipient of numerous honorary degrees; honors established in his name: Elie Wiesel award for Holocaust Research, University of Haifa; Elie Wiesel Chair in Holocaust Studies, Bar-Ilan University; Elie Wiesel Endowment Fund for Jewish Culture, University of Denver; Elie Wiesel Distinguished Service award, University of Florida; Elie Wiesel awards for Jewish Arts and Culture, B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundations; Elie Wiesel Chair in Judaic Studies, Connecticut College

CAREER
Foreign correspondent at various times for Yedioth Ahronoth, Tel Aviv, Israel, L'Arche, Paris, France, and Jewish Daily Forward, New York, NY, 1949--; City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, distinguished professor, 1972-76; Boston University, Boston, MA, Andrew Mellon professor in the humanities, 1976--, professor of Philosophy, 1988--. Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, Henry Luce visiting scholar in Humanities and Social Thought, 1982-83; Florida International University, Miami, distinguished visiting professor of literature and philosophy, 1982. Chair, United States President's Commission on the Holocaust, 1979-80, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 1980-86; appointed to board of Swiss fund for Holocaust survivors, 1996.