Elie Wiesel fought against Holocaust denial through his timeless writing. His son pointed to his example in an interview with NR.
Many observers have invoked the Holocaust when describing the Hamas atrocities of October 7 and the subsequent rationalizations and denials coming from certain quarters of the West, but a vanishingly small number of them possess the moral authority of Elisha Wiesel, a businessman and advocate for the Jewish people, whose father, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie, captured the horrors of that period in his timeless literary works.
Elisha told National Review on Tuesday that the indifference to Hamas’s savagery among certain academics, journalists, and activists is reminiscent of the apathy his father fought tirelessly against throughout his life.
“What’s interesting about Night and many of the messages that my father issued about the Holocaust is he always said that — much as it bothered him that a generation of Germans could be taught to hate as fiercely as they did — what always bothered him the most was that there were people who were just indifferent to it,” Wiesel said.
Night, which Elie Wiesel published in 1960, is a seminal account of his experiences with his father in Nazi concentration camps. In the memoir, he describes his loss of faith and growing contempt for a human race that could inflict such suffering. It is the first in a trilogy — followed by 1961’s Dawn and 1962’s Day — that explores Wiesel’s thoughts on the horror he and millions of other European Jews endured.
“There were American Jews who sat there going about their lives, and they weren’t incensed by it,” Elisha continued. “They weren’t consumed with it. They weren’t determined to do whatever they could to rescue their European brethren in the Jewish community.”
In the Jewish people’s hour of need, it is imperative that other communities, which have always received support from Jews, stand by them, Wiesel insisted.
“We’re seeing the face of evil in the face of Hamas and all of those who support them and apologize for them,” he said. “We’re seeing heroes like President Biden who are standing with Israel and rejecting her modern-day blood libel accusers. And then you’re seeing the indifferent, who kind of can’t be bothered, who are just really not tuning in.”
The “modern-day blood libel accusers” to which Wiesel referred include those who falsely claimed that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in the Gaza Strip, among other lies told by campus activists and their allies in the media. Some have even gone so far as to question whether Hamas even committed the horrors that have been well documented by the IDF and first responders.
The editors of the Yale Daily News, for example, affixed a “correction” at the bottom of an op-ed documenting terrorist acts committed on October 7, stating that reports of Hamas raping women and beheading men are “unsubstantiated.” The News ultimately released a statement saying it was wrong to have attached the editor’s notes.
Student journalists are not alone in downplaying Hamas’s evil. Los Angeles Times reporter Adam Elmahrek denied reports of beheaded babies, and Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, without condemning the Hamas attack, claimed that Palestinians were “rightfully” pointing out “that their own pain and deaths under the actions of the Israeli state have been ignored for years.” She also re-shared on X a post asking, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”
Wiesel described the dual mindsets that he believes contribute to those refusing to reckon with Hamas’s brutality.
“I think there are two pieces: There’s a denial of the atrocities, where some people are just saying they didn’t happen. There are a couple reasons for that. It could be flat-out antisemitism, meaning people are just determined to tell a narrative that has the Jews as the bad guys,” Wiesel said. “Or it could be some sort of cognitive dissonance that they’re experiencing — this is a generation that’s grown up in peacetime for the most part; they’ve never really had to confront true evil. And the things that Hamas did are so evil that the easier thing to do, cognitively, is just to say, ‘Well, it couldn’t have happened. It must be lies from the Jews. It must be lies from Israel.'”
Wiesel differentiates that simple denial from what he describes as a broader and perhaps more pernicious phenomenon of placing blame on Israel, of accusing the Jews who on October 7 suffered the single largest massacre of their people since the Holocaust of committing genocide in their own right.
“In the same way that 1,000 years ago, a village of Jews would be presented with a dead Christian baby and then told, ‘This is your fault. You did this,’ Palestinians are being presented as victims rather than as a group with any agency at all,” he said. “Their suffering, cynically manipulated by Hamas, is laid at the feet of Israel. And that’s a much more intentional antisemitic act, even more so than the denial. It’s Holocaust inversion to take the victims and turn them into the aggressors, which is what we’re seeing.”
But despite the number of Western elites intent on casting blame on Israel and turning a blind eye to Jewish suffering, Wiesel isn’t losing hope.
“I think that every time somebody stands up on social media and corrects misinformation, reminding a community of what happened on October 7, of what exactly Hamas did, the more that comes out,” he said. “I think it is helpful because if you don’t do it, you’re just leaving a void for people to speculate. Is it the only thing that makes a difference? No. But I genuinely believe that there is still an American center, which is decent and spans both parties, and when they see more clearly what has happened here, we’ll have a lot less tolerance for the anti-Israel antisemitism that we’ve been living with for far too long.”
While appeals to anger can be dangerous when wielded irresponsibly, Wiesel believes there is an opportunity to tap into that unvarnished emotion to galvanize support for Israel and opposition to antisemitic barbarity.
“One of the things I think about a lot is how Black Lives Matter catalyzed so many people outside the black community into action,” he said. “So many allies, including myself, went and marched peacefully for black lives because it started from such a raw anger. I wonder if sometimes we as a Jewish community get sad at what we see, are resolved to fight it, and know that we will be strong. But I wonder whether or not we tap into the raw emotion that is anger sufficiently, and whether or not the world just hasn’t seen us angry enough.”
Wiesel said that it is ultimately up to Jews to demand the world’s attention. Only when Jews speak up loudly enough for all humanity to hear will non-Jews come to the Jewish people’s aid in the numbers required.
“Until we actually vocally shout just how unbelievably furious we are that this can occur and that people can whitewash it,” he told NR, “people might not listen.”