Wiesel Urges Education To Combat Fanaticism
By NATALIE L. SHERMAN, Contributing Writer

Harvard Crimson, MA
Dec 7 2004

CRIMSON/ PHILIP A. ERNST
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Boston University professor Elie Wiesel
speaks at Memorial Church yesterday evening.

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Elie Wiesel, who won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize for his writings on
the Holocaust, spoke last night about the need to combat religious
fanaticism through education to a packed crowd in Memorial Church.
“The threat to the future of the world has a name and it’s
fanaticism,” said Wiesel, who is the Mellon Professor in the
Humanities at Boston University.

In his introductory remarks, University President Lawrence H. Summers
said that it was “high time” that Wiesel spoke to the entire Harvard
community and praised the author’s writings, which Summers said help
individuals “find the courage to stand up for what is right
everywhere.”

Wiesel is the author of almost three dozen books. His first, Night,
was published in English in 1960 and is a fictional story of a young
boy suffering in a concentration camp. He has also written two
memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full.

Wiesel condemned the rise of religious fanaticism, and said he was an
advcate of non-violence. The education of potential radicals, he
said, is the best way to fight this threat.

But in his opening remarks, Wiesel also questioned the degree to
which education alone could fight indifference.

He noted that some of his darkest days following World War Two, when
he was imprisoned in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, had come when he
learned that the majority of killers possessed college degrees.

“Wasn’t culture meant to be a shield?” he asked. “What is culture,
what is civilization? It’s meant to be a limit.”

Opting for a conversational instead of a lecture format, Wiesel only
spoke for about 10 minutes before fielding a range of questions from
the audience.

Many of the questions asked concerned current events, like the crises
in Darfur and Chechnya.

But Wiesel cautioned the audience against using controversial terms
like genocide, Holocaust or anti-Semitic lightly.

“I believe in words and not to use them just like that,” he said. “If
it’s genocide the whole world has to intervene.”

Indeed, while responding to questions about genocides in Sudan,
Armenia and Chechnya, Wiesel shied away from the term, preferring to
call it “mass murder.”

The question and answer session was cut short due to time
constraints, but no one raised questions about either the
Israel-Palestine conflict or the American occupation of Iraq.

Wiesel was questioned, however, about his ability to maintain his
faith.

“God and I have our problems,” he siad. “In Night I said some harsh
things, but I never divorced God. I was ready to be an orphan…but
not a divorce.”

Wiesel also said that he tried to include at least one element of
hope in all his writings.

When asked how the lessons of the Holocaust would be maintained in
the face of time, Wiesel said that he believed his role was “to be a
witness, not a judge, and he who listens to a witness becomes a
witness.”

After the almost 90-minute talk, Bernard Steinberg, the executive
director of Harvard Hillel, which sponsored the event, called Weisel
“one of the great moral voices of his generation.”

“He is…a man profoundly grounded in the Jewish tradition who is
interested in the well-being of the world as a whole,” he said.

President of Hillel Anna M. Solomon-Schwartz ’06 said she had been
inspired by the author’s remarks.

“I think his message of passion and political action is the most
important lesson we can learn from him,” she said.