Eliezer (‘Elie’) Wiesel (1928-2016) was a world-renowned author, examiner of the human condition, and considered by many to be the greatest humanitarian of the twentieth century. Professor
first came to prominence in 1958 after the appearance of La Nuit (Night), a memoir (published with the help of François Mauriac) that describes his experiences as a Jew in the German concentration camps during the Second World War. It was the first of his more than fifty books, and it established him as a supremely eloquent witness to both the evil of the Holocaust and to the essential humanity that the Holocaust could not obliterate.
Elie Wiesel labored to teach the world that the act of remembering is uniquely revelatory of our humanity. He was also an academic, serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, where he was also a University Professor. His particular area of specialization was the literature of memory. He was also a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York and the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University, and was in addition the first Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He served as the President of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
He was an honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a Grand’Croix de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, and was admitted honoris causa to degrees of more than one hundred universities. In his adoptive country of the United States of America many awards were conferred upon him, including the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of Liberty, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and he was furthermore the recipient of countless honors from around the world, including—perhaps most notably—the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr Wiesel was a Visitor of Ralston College.
