#Eli Wiesel

[jewish-microwave-laser]

And here is the most devastating fact of Frank's posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: we know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don't want to hear it.

The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." These words are "inspiring," by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank's hiding place, in her writings, in her "legacy." It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being "truly good at heart" before meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

We know this, because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents have achieved anything like Frank's diary's fame. Those that have come close have only done so by observing those same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don't insult their persecutors The work that came closest to achieving Frank's international fame might be Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank's diary, recounting the tortures of a fifteen-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Was Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story told in Night, but it exploded with rage against his family's murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version under the new title La Nuit—a work that repositioned the young survivor's rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how this society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame G[-]d. This approach earned Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as, years later, selection for Oprah's Book Club, the American epitome of grace. It did not, however, make teenage girls read his book in Japan, the way they read Frank's. For that he would have had to hide much, much more.

from "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp 9–10

[perfectquote]

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elie Wiesel

[girlactionfigure]

We are saddened to learn that Holocaust survivor Marion Wiesel, the wife of Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, passed away this weekend at the age of 94. She was instrumental in supporting her husband’s public career as a moral voice about the Shoah and bringing the Shoah into public consciousness, and translated many books written by Mr. Wiesel into English, including his memoir ‘Night,’ which details his teenage experiences in Nazi concentration camps. May her memory be a blessing.

Born Mary Renate Erster in Vienna in 1931, her family escaped Austria after the Nazi takeover, making it to Belgium, then France, where they were imprisoned in the Gurs concentration camp, and finally to Switzerland. They immigrated to the US in 1949, where years later, she met her future husband Elie Wiesel.

Together the couple’s work through the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity aimed to overcome indifference toward the suffering of oppressed and marginalized populations around the world. WJC honored Elie and Marion Wiesel both with the Theodor Herzl Award in 2013 for their lifetime achievements.

May her memory be a blessing.

[perfectfeelings]

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

[quotefeeling]

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

[thoughtkick]

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

[nesyanast]

"I asked dozens of them, young and old alike, “Who is a Jew? What is Judaism? What makes you a Jew?” They shrugged their shoulders. The questions do not interest them. There is a time to philosophize, a time to accept the commandments of Judaism as a revelation from Sinai, and a time to ask questions. They are Jews, and that is that; the rest is unimportant. A Jew is one who feels himself a Jew."

__________

The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry by Elie Wiesel

Photo: Leni Sonnenfeld

[thehopefulquotes]

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elie Wiesel

[key-cat]

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

愛の反対は憎しみではない、無関心だ。

Elie Wiesel エリ・ヴィーゼル　　

[stay-close]

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elie Wiesel

[resqectable]

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

[askyea-poesy]

Why do I write. Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness.

Elie Wiesel

[perfectquote]

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

[quotemadness]

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel

[perfectfeelings]

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elie Wiesel

[girlactionfigure]