Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence

Book Talk Admission: Free Watch the video

As an orphaned survivor and witness to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) became a torchbearer for victims and survivors of the Holocaust at a time when the world preferred to forget. How did this frail, soft-spoken man from a small village in the Carpathians become such an influential presence on the world stage? Drawing from Wiesel’s writings and interviews with his family, close friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger’s new book, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, presents Wiesel as both a revered Nobel laureate and a man of complex psychological texture and contradictions. Join YIVO for a discussion of this new book featuring Berger in conversation with Samuel Norich.

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About the Speakers

Joseph Berger was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for thirty years, and he continues to contribute periodically. He has taught urban affairs at the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College. He is the author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust and lives in New York City.

Samuel Norich served as executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 1980-1992, and as vice president of the World Jewish Congress from 1975 to 1981. Norich is the author of What Will Bind Us Now?: A Report on the Institutional Ties Between Israel and American Jewry. Norich currently serves as the president of the Forward Association. He was the publisher and chief executive of the English and Yiddish Forward for two decades, until he retired in 2017.