Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #10
In 2013, at the age of 82, Elie Wiesel unexpectedly had to undergo emergency open heart surgery. The procedure was successful and afterwards Wiesel explored his experience in a lecture that became this week’s text. It was to be his final book. The slim volume, Open Heart, provides an intimate portrait of Wiesel’s personality and […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #9
Sages and Dreamers collects twenty-five years of lectures delivered by Elie Wiesel at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, connecting the heroes of the past both in scripture and in Jewish tradition with the present. Each figure, according to his 1991 preface, “stands for an epoch and its problems, conflicts, and aspirations which […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #8
Elie Wiesel received Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. His acceptance speech and related lecture, “Hope, Despair and Memory,” which was delivered in Oslo the day after his acceptance speech, are amongst his most well-known public addresses. This week we revisit his famous words by looking at particularly evocative passages so that we can reflect upon […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #7
Elie Wiesel’s A Jew Today originally appeared as Un Juif Aujourd’hui in 1978. The book is a collection of essays, stories, diary entries, portraits, and dialogues written between 1971 and 1978. These short pieces describe an evolving understanding of Jewishness woven out of current events, history, and memory. Wiesel writes about a wide variety of topics, including […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #6
Elie Wiesel’s A Beggar in Jerusalem, originally published in 1968 as Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, explores the experiences of David, a Holocaust survivor, who visits Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. In A Beggar in Jerusalem, Wiesel weaves together a complicated understanding between the past and present as well as the spiritual and physical. He reveals these […]
Mapping and Unmapping Jewish History in Early Modern Bibles
What role did maps that depict the Holy Land and other biblical locations play in constructing spaces construed as “Jewish”? This is the question that drove our second BUJS forum of spring semester on February 13. Our speaker, Professor Jeffrey Shoulson (University of Connecticut), described his exploration of early maps as he tried to find […]
How Judaism Became an American Religion
Our last BUJS Forum of the year took place on April 27 in the Elie Wiesel Center library. Our speaker, Dr. Rachel Gordan, joined us to speak about how Judaism rose to prominence as a major American religion in the 1950s and 1960s, even becoming known as “America’s third faith.” The forum was titled after […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #5
Our text this week is Wiesel’s 1964 The Gates of the Forest, first published in French and translated to the English in 1966. This novel, set at the beginning of World War II, follows the struggle of a seventeen-year-old Hungarian Jew, Gregor, who is hiding from both Nazi and Hungarian forces in a cave in […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #4
In 1962, Elie Wiesel published the final part of his Night trilogy, the novel DAY. The book first appeared in French as Le jour and in English as The Accident. Like Dawn, Day addresses the struggle of the Holocaust survivor to dwell in the world of the living while feeling a ceaseless pull toward the world of […]
Beyond Sartre and Adorno: Jean Améry’s Radical Questioning of Jewish Identity and Philosophy in the Wake of the Shoah
What the Shoah has left philosophy with is a failed transcendence. The writings of philosopher Jean Améry in response to his experiences of the Holocaust do not focus on ideology, nor do they focus on the incomprehensible theological meaning behind this destruction. Rather, they focus intensely on the issue of identity. In our second BUJS […]