Judge Dennis Davis
Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer in Conversation with Elisha Wiesel
Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer in Conversation with Elisha Wiesel
Guys, are we on the air?
Yeah, I think Wendy’s just waiting for everybody to come in online. Give it a minute or two.
So we’re going to give people, yeah, a moment or two to come online. And then what’s going to happen is I’m going to welcome you and introduce you, and then I’m going to hand you over to David and to Dennis. Let’s just give them, maybe, about a minute to clock in, to enter the presentation hall in the cloud.
One point. In less than a minute, we have over 1300 people online already.
[David] Yeah, it’s amazing.
Astonishing.
Incredible. Maybe give it a bit more time, Wendy.
[Wendy] I will.
Yep.
All right, I’m going to start and I’m going to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody. Welcome back. It is my great privilege and honour to welcome Elisha Wiesel. Elisha is the son of Marion and the late Elie Wiesel. Elisha’s words and actions mark him as an emerging fighter against poverty, an advocate for opportunity and student of Jewish continuity. His strategic advice, sage wisdom, and tireless advocacy will be invaluable as Zionist navigates the challenging moment of our community and the unprecedented growth of our national grassroots movement. Elisha is a recovering Wall Street executive, since retiring from a 25-year financial markets career at Goldman Sachs at the end of 2019, he served in 2020 as one of the lead technologists in Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. In his most recent board position at Good Shepherd Services, Elisha raised millions of dollars for New York’s neediest by convening Midnight Madness, where hundreds of finance professionals stayed up all night solving elaborate puzzles on the city streets. When his father passed, Elisha realised how many others missed his voice. And so when opportunities for impact arise, Elisha shares his father’s message and continues his legacy by standing up for persecuted communities.
In the last few years, Elisha has spoken at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about the need to protect the LGBTQ community. Shana Light was speaking at Auschwitz on the plight of Syrian refugees being denied western asylum, written for the financial times about the urgency of upholding DACA and taking his son to peacefully march for black lives. Elisha is using his time in quarantine to learn Metallica songs on guitar from his son, to learn TikTok dances from his daughter, to organise his father’s archives, and to learn a little Talmud every day and to try and be a good father, husband and son. Thank you, Elisha, for joining us today. It is a real privilege to have you with us. I’m going to hand you over to Dennis Davis and to David Peimer, who will be interviewing you for approximately 50, 45 to 50 minutes, and then we’ll have time for questions. So over to you, and thank you very much.
Thank you so much to Wendy, to Shana and Judy and everybody arranging it. And mostly, thank you so much to Elisha. It’s really an honour and a privilege and much appreciated in terms of your sharing today, giving your time. And just thank you from the bottom of our hearts, from Dennis and I for you being here today. Appreciate it.
It’s a pleasure to be with you, David and Dennis and Wendy to be with you and 1700 intimate friends.
Just to start, if you could help us with a sense of, Elisha, the work you’re doing now with your foundation, the work you’re doing in terms of your dad’s legacy and the work that you are doing and how you’re taking it further yourself in our times as well.
Sure. I mean, it’s a big, broad question. I spend about a third of my time, I would say, on non-profit activities. My breakdown in life and retirement, if you will, is I spend about a third of my time on commercial activities, a third of my time on not-for-profit and philanthropic, and then a third on just purely family and play is kind of my mix of the moment. And in terms of philanthropic involvement, you know, my parents created The Elie Wiesel Foundation shortly after my father won the Nobel Prize. They used the prize money, in fact, to seed it. And while my father was alive, the foundation did a lot of programming around conferences, bringing together Nobel Prize laureates, bringing together particularly children from sides that found each other in enmity, whether that was Ireland and mainstream England, mainland England, you know, over the Protestant Catholic problems, whether it was Bosnia, Serbia. And they did a lot of those sort of outreach, bringing people together with different perspectives to try to promote peace and discussion. They had conferences all over the world with heads of state.
My mother’s side of the programming really was much more hands-on. If you think about it, my father was a much more cerebral person. He believed in ideas, he believed in words. My mother was a little bit more , you know. She believed in what are we actually going to do to make a difference today? And they started something called Beit Tzipora for Ethiopian immigrants into Israel. And the idea was that with all that my mom had seen as an NAACP card carrying member, all that she’d seen about the mistreatment of African Americans in the United States, she was determined that these problems not repeat in Israel, her beloved Israel.
So we began a set of programming there over 25 years ago to really create educational centres and set up a path for Ethiopian Israelis to more fully acculturate and have the same chance of success that everyone had in Israel. So that’s their activities. It’s a big broad question. So I can tell you a lot more about what I do, but it’s, you know, I’m really looking at what programmes, how to first of all, keep the programmes alive that my parents had, but also thinking about new ones. And I can give you more examples of those two.
Could you give us a few more examples of the one you’re thinking of and new ones and some of they created?
Yeah, of course. So, you know, one that we’re working on these days is… And the way that I’m conceiving of the Elie Wiesel Foundation going forward is my father had so many different roles in his life. My father was a refugee. So we have programmes that deal with the refugee, particularly these Ethiopian Israelis, because they left under great economic distress and threat of persecution. They left their homeland and did this incredible trek to reach Israel. We have programmes that address, I think, that aspect of human rights. My father was an educator. For some time we’ve had a programme called the Elie Wiesel Ethics Prize, which is really for college students.
But what we’re building now at the postgraduate level is something called the Witness Institute that my friend Ariel Burger, a devoted student of my father for many years is building around moral leadership, really at the postgraduate level to bring together a dozen cohorts, you know, every year and get them to engage from a variety of backgrounds and understand the way my father taught. But there will be others. My father was a journalist. So I’m envisioning doing programming that will shine a light on journalists who shine a clear light on issues we need to grapple with. So with all of these different things that my father did in life, I’m exploring and seeing what can we do, where do we make grants, put in our own IP, if you will, our own branding, our own thoughts, and look to expand work in each of these different spheres.
Okay. Thank you very much. Okay, Dennis, over to you.
Can I take you back a little Elisha, please. I’m curious, you know. I thought to myself, how do I try to ask you questions about your father has written 57 books and goodness knows how many publications. So I thought, let me have a look at what he wrote when he was given the Nobel Prize. It’s a wonderful speech. There’s a speech apart from the lecture. And fundamental to all of that, fundamental to all of his work is the concept of memory, that we should pass on that memory to the next generation. So since you are the next generation, I’m interested, how did he pass it on to you?
Sure. So, you know, it’s interesting. My father never really sat me down at any age and said, okay, this is the story of our family. This is The Shoah, this is the Holocaust. Here’s what happened. Here’s where I come from. Like, I don’t really ever recall that particular conversation unfolding. It was much more of an ambient learning where, you know, my friends would be going to Palm Beach, you know, when they were eight, nine , 10 years old for their winter breaks. We’d be going to visit the death camps in Poland. It was just a different childhood growing up. There’s nothing you can say, you know. the other kids would be like, oh, well, my father was an Israeli Air Force pilot and now he flies El Al. Oh really?
Well, my dad runs a pharmacy. I’d be like, well, my dad, I think something really bad happened to him and now he’s a teacher. You know, that was my extent of understanding as an elementary school student. So a lot of it was ambient learning, and I think that was intentional, and my father did not want to burden me. I think he felt that forget the burden of the Shoah, which was obviously so painful in the first generation after. I think my father felt that in general, to be a Jew, to be a Jew with a decimated lineage, to have the burden of 5,000 years of history being brought up in such a modern environment with so many threats. He felt that it was a- He knew that it was a privilege, but he also understood that it could feel like a burden. And he did whatever he could to not make it feel like one.
Can I just ask this? I understand. If I’ve got it wrong, it’s ‘cause I’ve misread it. I read an interview of you about saying Kaddish for your father. So I’m correct in saying, you actually said, at the end of the day, you realised he was teaching you something by you saying Kaddish for him.
It wasn’t just teaching. I mean, my father really asked only a few things of me in his life. We all ask that a father makes a son. The first one he made, you know, when I started dating, when I was in college, and his ask was, you know, Elisha, I just want you to know that it is my expectation that you will marry Jewish. And he was very clear. He said, you can marry someone non-Jewish if they convert, but it has to be a real conversion. Or you can marry someone who is raised Jewish. I don’t care if they were reform, conservative, Chabad, orthodox, whatever. But you have to marry Jewish, because that’s very important to me. And if you don’t, I want you to know that, you know, you’ll- I can’t even consider it. This is an ask I’m making of you. The only other ask that my father really made of me was really when he was sick, closer to the end, he said, I would like you to say Kaddish from me. I expect you to say Kaddish from me every day as it should be done. And, you know, I really had thought that this was him asking me to do him a favour.
But as I began to reenter the world of Yiddishkeit by saying Kaddish for my father, and I started going to shul, it was really the first time I’d gone to shul that wasn’t Rosh Hashanah and Kippur, in maybe 20 years that I went and started doing it. And I, you know, all of a sudden finding things that I had never experienced before. The concept of a smaller shul, where it’s about the and not so much about the show, or at least how I’d perceived it to be. I found my home. I found places where I felt the davening was authentic, and I felt the people were authentic and I felt very, very connected as the year went on. All of a sudden I had a role to play in all of this. I wasn’t a stranger anymore. I was part of the fabric. It was needed that people who were to say Kaddish. And there was a time for me to do that. And, you know, I slowly learned how to daven for the amud, how to lead the prayers at all of the different services. And it became actually a very important part of my life. I realised in short that he was doing me a last favour, and it wasn’t the other way around.
You see, why I find that particularly interesting was because he opens up his Nobel Prize lecture with a famous story of the Baal Shem Tov, which I always loved and I’d learned from him. And he repeats it there. The Baal Shem Tov, basically being expelled to an island and having forgotten everything because he tried to bring the Messiah on too quickly. And ultimately, the story, I’m not going to repeat it because, but by and large, the take home point is that the Baal Shem Tov forgets everything and then relearns it, because the one thing that he and his companion know is the alef-bet And by reciting alef-bet, they recover everything. And I was curious whether that was in some rather strange, mystical way, the journey that you’ve undertaken or if I got that wrong.
No. First of all, there’s so many great stories about the Besht. But I mean…
Yeah, yeah.
And I’ll tell you another one shortly. But, you know.
Oh, please, I love them.
There are so many things in my life that I look back and I feel I did wrong for whatever reason or things where I’m like, oof. Like, this is going to be hard for me to explain when I get upstairs and have to answer for my life. But I’ll tell you that when, you know, I made the decision to marry, and it was not an easy decision for me to marry, mostly because I was, you know, I was a young man in my 20s in New York City. And it’s a good place to be when you’re in your 20s and young and you work in finance and you can afford to take girls out. And I didn’t really, I wasn’t thinking so much about long-term, this concept of having a family. I was playing, I was having a good time. And I realised, first of all, I happened to meet the right woman, which makes all the difference. But also, I was realising in terms of time that, you know, I wanted, my parents deserved to see grandchildren in their lifetime, and I will tell you that when my father had my son on his knee learning the aleph-bet, it was one of the great mystical and rewarding moments of my life. And I said, ah, no matter what else I do wrong for the next however many years I live, I’m going to have this in my court. You know, when I’m asked to defend my life, that I made this moment happen.
Can I just ask one final question, just one final quick finding out, David?
[David] Sure. What did your father then think of the fact that you spent all those years at Goldman Sachs? I mean, was he totally relaxed about that? Or had he hoped that you would do something different?
He loved it. First of all, my father really loved it. And I think he loved, first of all, that I was challenged, that I was stimulated, that I enjoyed it. And I think he loved that I was using a skillset and a part of my brain so foreign to him. My father was not a numbers guy. My father was not a data science or a markets guy. These were things that were just so beyond him. And he just loved that I was doing something and that I was thriving in it. And, you know, it’s so funny. This other story about The Besht that I wanted to mention, because it’s related. You know, there were moments in my life where I was very far from Judaism, where I would have really painful arguments with my father that I’m sure tore him apart, where I told him, you know, I don’t believe, I don’t believe in God. You know, it’s nice that there was something called Judaism, but like, really, what does it mean for me? There’s a modern world now. There are all these other things to learn, and I don’t know that this is something I’m going to continue.
And my father, you know, there was a story that I found out afterwards by The Besht that was in one of his books where, you know, a man comes to The Besht and says, you know, what do I do about my son? He’s gone so astray. He does this, he does that. He’s lost him. And the Besht says, love him more. Love him more. And that’s what my father did. My father had this capacity to love me for who I was, no matter what painful conversation we were having, no matter the direction I was going, he approved of or didn’t understand. He was just a source of unremitting love. And I have to tell you for, you know, for those of you who grew up with parents that were just, that were capable of broadcasting that, you know what that does to you.
You know the strength that gives you. You know the solid two feet it puts you on when your parents have confidence in you and invested in you, and they love you no matter what. It’s a gift. It’s a gift you have your whole life and you want to give it to your kids. And my father had that, and the spirit of The Besht. He loved me more, no matter what I did. And ultimately, there are aspects of my relationship with my father that I think because of that, really only came to fruition after his passing. But I still have a very rich relationship with my father that has grown in unexpected ways in the years since he’s left us. Sorry, David, that I interrupted you.
No, no, no. Thank you so much, Elisha. That’s beautiful. Powerful. Can I just, extending on that, you mentioned home and being on your father’s knee and these stories. Can I ask you, just going a little bit more, a bit deeper with that, what for you, it was like growing up in the home of a Holocaust survivor, such as your father and how that growing up impacted on your life? I mean, you’ve mentioned a lot there, but anything else? Yeah.
Listen, I’ll tell you how I felt. But, you know, everything I felt, you have to look through the lens of, you have to realise I was a kid who had everything. I was growing up in Manhattan in a family that was, you know, well-to-do. They send me to a private school, and there was always what to eat. There was always a roof over my head. So, I mean, you have to realise all of the problems that I had or thought I had were very, what do we call them? First world problems, right? But I was unhappy for much of my childhood. I was an awkward, bookish kid. I have a half sister who’s 12 years older than me that didn’t live with us from my mother’s previous marriage. So I kind of grew up on my own. We were travelling all over the world, So I didn’t have friends that were going with me, and I spent a lot of my time in books. And, you know, I didn’t, as I think so many can have, I had a very troubled adolescence.
It was very difficult for me, that transition from preteen to teenager. And I had a lot of frustration with, you know, the social skills that I didn’t have. I had a lot of frustration with the fact that everybody at the yeshiva that I went to really only saw me as an extension of my father and had no idea what was going on within my own own mind, within my own soul. There were very few people who saw me clearly. So it was extremely difficult. And, you know, for me it felt difficult. And I found all sorts of ways to channel, you know, destructive energy and also some positive creative energy. In some ways, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me because that frustration and determination to become my own person led me to really carve out new areas that had nothing to do with my family. And I’m sure that that was painful for them, and it was hard for me. But in retrospect, it’s some of the most important work I did.
Thank you so much. It’s extraordinarily honest. And just really appreciate and thank you. And when you were carving it out, your own path and your own journey, did you feel, in a way, I don’t want you to just use the cliche of the word trauma, but in terms of the history of your dad, the family, did you feel that this was, okay, this is really important, but nevertheless, the love stayed?
No, I pushed it as much out of my consciousness as I could. For me, you know, I didn’t want to talk about the Holocaust. I didn’t want to talk about Judaism, frankly. I was at yeshiva, you know, for 14 years and absorbing it nonstop. And I was desperate to think about anything and everything else. I got an electric guitar and I learned how to play punk rock and heavy metal, and I was really into girls and, you know, finding ways to get in trouble. And, you know, these were the things on my mind. And really, it wasn’t until later in life, you know. And I can tell you about it a bit later. My father, my cousin and I took a trip to Sighet and then to Auschwitz when I was, you know, this was after college. And that for me had a very significant impact. And really before then, I don’t think I spent a lot of time thinking about these things.
Can I ask you just lastly on this, the impact it had when you went to Sighet and Auschwitz, and the change for you, if you could help us get a sense of that for yourself?
Yeah, look. I think for the first 22 years of my life, I think I had always viewed, especially as a conscious adult, you know, I’m not talking about what I felt when I was, you know, up until the age of 10 or 11, but as sort of a conscious adult, the consciousness that began as a teenager in the formation of the forging of my own identity, I think I’d spent a solid decade doing everything I can, I could to be other, to be distant from that. If my father is this, I’m going to be that. If that’s what he represents, I’m going to represent something else, and to just find my own space. And I think it was on that trip that for the first time I saw that my father, in addition to being a father, in addition to being, you know, a leader who could speak on world stages, in addition to being a teacher, I saw him for the first time as a hurt, vulnerable child. I saw the deep pain within him that he kept so close, I think so much of the rest of his life. And for the first time I started to appreciate my father had a childhood. And I’m standing there, I’m standing in the streets where he was a child. I’m standing in the streets where he would walk down and get his chalot for Shabbat dinner, and he’d be walking with his sister and, you know, a friendly face would be poking out. His grandmother would be waving at him out the window, asking what he learned at Hiddur. Like, these were real things.
My father had a childhood, and the thought that it was also brutally ripped away. And walking Sighet with him and my cousin. I say cousin, but really, he’s a brother to me. It was like we had a radio with us, is the only way I can explain it. And my father was that radio and he could hear things that we couldn’t hear. He was picking up emissions that were actually being broadcast, but nobody else could hear them but him, or a fellow survivor. And he was, I think, hearing the Jews of Sighet as they had lived prior to the roundup and being sent to the gas chambers. He could see these people. He could see the shouts of joy, all these things that were happening in the daily life. And I could see the effect that it had on him. And it shook him very, very deeply. And it was as though I could hear them too. It was an uncommon experience of empathy between people, what happened there in the summer of 1995.
Thank you, Elisha. That’s in extraordinarily honest, and cannot say how much I appreciate, because as you’re saying it, when we see the pain and suffering, you know, in somebody else like your father, and so he became real, as you said, vulnerable and you saw him as a child, you know, how it changes us so much. Do you find that when, in your work at the moment, do you find when helping people, helping other people now to have a similar kind of experience that you had, to see the pain and suffering in others can help sensitise them to, you know, just something of what’s going on out of their own lives?
Look, I want to answer it honestly. And you should remember, I hope you don’t have the wrong impression of me, just because I, you know, am affiliated with my parents’ foundation, because I’m involved in other nonprofits. I don’t spend my days, you know, dealing with people in need to the point where I see them face to face and look in their eyes and can see their pain and make the decision to help. I wish I did. I think that that’s a noble thing and perhaps my life will take me more in that direction. But I work a bit more of a distance. But I will say that when you hear the gratitude of, you know, a young Ethiopian child in Israel who has an education that he would not have otherwise had or a chance to go to one of the best army units that they might not have had, if they didn’t have the training in the Hebrew and the acculturation or even the courage, the idea to know that this is something they should ask for.
You feel very moved. One is moved to see these things. And when you read about places where people are suffering, whether you read about, you know, millions of Uyghur Muslims being put into detention camps in China, you can’t help but feel empathy. But what I experienced with my father that day does not map in any way to those things. That was a son realising a father’s vulnerability for the first time and it wasn’t comparable to any of these other, you know, moments that I think you referred to.
Sorry, I was interested. You must have been in your twenties by then.
[Elisha] Yeah.
So for the first 20 odd years of your life, in a sense, he sort of protected you from that in a way.
He protected, and then I started running from it. And I don’t know how much of it was him protecting and how much was me running, but the net result was a great deal of distance.
But it’s interesting, that that concept that you have. Probably the person. Probably. Definitely the person who articulated more than anybody else in luminous fashion, the idea of not forgetting, and of memory.
Sure.
And yet on the other hand, paradoxically, for the first 20 odd years, his own pain in a sense, he kept to himself. He didn’t tell his son about the same way as you experienced. I think it’s very natural, by the way, but I’m just interested.
Yeah. I think he kept his pain to himself for much of his life. You know, he didn’t sleep well. He had nightmares almost every night, you know. He told me that sleep was not- My father and sleep did not have a good relationship. And I think that that was very real. But, you know, you talk about memory. I think memory has a profound role in our family, and it’s something that, you know, is one of our highest values.
So on that, Elisha, you know, when your father spoke, again, Nobel Prize , because being from South Africa, I was well aware of his anti-apartheid attitudes for a very long time. He drew on those experiences. And in fact, spoke about the fact that we have to remember the suffering of my people, to quote from the Nobel Prize lecture, as much as we must remember that, as we must remember the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, the Palestinians and the discrete Indians, et cetera, et cetera and the list is endlessly suggested. So how does one, from your perspective, how does one combine, if I could call it the concern for one’s own people and the concern for a broader concept of humanity? I mean, people like Rosa Luxembourg would’ve suggested that it’s not that I’m not concerned about my own people, the Jewish people, but I haven’t got enough time for that. I have to be concerned with humanity as a whole. So I’m particularly interested how that was negotiated by him. And to be perfectly frank, you’ve been negotiating it yourself from all the stuff that you’ve been doing.
Yeah, look. I think this is one of the tensions that, I think, captured my father’s uniqueness, perfectly. My father saw no contradiction between engaging with the world fully and being a good Jew. I remember I would, you know, when you think about what he wanted to be known as, the conversations I would have, he said, I just want to be known as a good Jew. That’s enough. That’s what I want. But what did being a good Jew mean? For him, a good Jew meant a Jew who was involved with the world. And a Jew who is involved with the world and stronger in everything he does, because he is so connected to 5,000 years of history, and he knows where he came from. And conversely, he felt that exposure to the world should only make one a better Jew and that being a better Jew should only engage. For him, it was a virtuous circle, not, you know, things in extremes that didn’t resonate when you put them together. So he saw no contradiction in it. And you’re right. My father in that speech addressed his hope for peace for the entire world. And I’m sure he laboured over how to represent the Palestinians. You mentioned them in passing. It’s hard to not dwell on that when you hear them across the list, because-
By the way, I’m sorry to interrupt you. But he actually said in his actual acceptance speech, directly said, I’m really concerned about Palestinians. I hate their tactics, I think, or their strategy I think what he said. So I’m sorry to interrupt you.
No, of course. For my father, and this is as complicated as Middle East politics and it’s as complicated as Holocaust memory, all of these things come together. You know, my father was a very proud and unapologetic Zionist. He was. My father, never for a moment thought that Israel should be viewed as compensation for the Holocaust. He hated that way of thinking. He thought, you can never, there will never be atonement, not from God and not from the human race for what was done. It doesn’t matter who signed the Balfour Declaration or the who let Israel exist. None of that will ever atone for the crime, and the question that was The Shoah. But he absolutely believed that the modern state of Israel was the only unfortunate guarantee that the Jews would never suffer again what we suffered. So he was an unapologetic Zionist, but of course, it troubled him to hear of Palestinian suffering. I would say that on the margin, my father put more on Palestinian leadership for the failure to have attained peace and to have attained a two-state solution, or to have attained some measure of stability and peace in the region for their people as well as ours than many liberals typically do today. I think that we often find that there are, you know, extremists tend to have the loudest voices, and you hear from the extreme left that, you know, Israel can do nothing right.
You know, we are the enemy. How dare we do these things. And you’ve even hear that the shameful word, apartheid thought of in the context of Israel. And then you hear people on the extreme right, who say also some very unpleasant things that makes me embarrassed when I hear how they discuss, you know, what should be done with other people in very inhumane terms. And my father absolutely believed that peace was possible. I don’t think he thought he’d saw it in his lifetime. See it in his lifetime, and he didn’t. But he felt that peace was possible. But he put a fair amount of the onus on Palestinian leadership to ultimately seek peace and tolerate an Israel that existed, and a Jewish people that existed. We’re 0.2% of the world population, Jews. 0.1% in Israel and 0.1% in the diaspora. And he felt very strongly that Israel deserved to exist.
And because of time, I would love to engage further with that, but let me move to two final questions that I have for myself.
Well, let’s keep with controversial things. I like it when we get to things that are-
Oh, good.
No, no, no, no, no.
[Elisha] Great. Great.
I’m not going to shy away from controversy. I’m afraid I get into too much trouble myself, all the time. And in fact, this is something that really did interest me because I get into controversy, something that you said. I understand that you worked for Michael Bloomberg. But during the course of that, you were quoted as saying that I was looking for a balance. That is, people who understand the need for social justice will also understand that the answer is not Marxism. That’s an intriguing statement. It’s not something I disagree with. But I’m interested. Where is that balance in your view?
I don’t know. I mean, one thing to realise is we Jews tend to have it badly when either extreme gets going too far. When you have over nationalistic states, you know, we tend to get the worst of it. When you have states that tend towards Marxism, we also tend to get beaten up. So, you know, we don’t fare well in the extremes. We fare well as a people where humanity fares well, in, you know, moderated capitalism that finds a balance between social needs and also the ability to have entrepreneurs who move the world forward. And I think that we are in such a politicised time. So yes, I was looking for a candidate who I felt occupied that balance. And by the way, I must say I’m very pleased with President Biden and Vice President Harris. I believe that although it’s scary for those of us who care as much about Israel as many of us do, to see that the Iran deal is, you know, really being contemplated again. And there are some scary things, and of course there’s also the fear that, you know, tax rates are going to go through the roof. If you can get that through Congress, although I don’t think he will in quite the way he’s proposing at the moment. I also must say that I’m very glad to see, you know, the humanity and character with which he’s leading the country. And I’m very optimistic for America’s future and the world’s future.
And how would your father viewed what has gone on in particularly the last number of years? He died in 2000- 2016, it was, I think.
He passed in 2016. Trump had been elected president.
I mean, Donald Trump was just about, or probably just to become president or was about to. He has been elected. So I’m curious, what do you think he would say about today? Not just America, but .
Look, I can never- I always feel terrible trying to predict what he would say. My father died. He’s achieved now a certain reward, which is nobody can put words in his mouth anymore. Right? He’s achieved that reward and he deserves it, you know. But I will tell you what I think when I hear-
Yeah, that’s what I’m interested in.
And I think, you know, it’s interesting. I found my father’s words on protests that I saw in media, whether it was in Facebook pages or pictures of signs being held at march. And one of the ones that once sees the most often is, you know, that silence is a crime, right? That to be silent is to aid the oppressor, and to be indifferent is to aid the oppressor, that indifference is worse than hate. And I understand where that came from. My father thought these things relative to the Holocaust, when there was so much silence. My father thought that when he was trying to get the world agitated appropriately, so about Soviet jury. But look at the world we live in today, and look at all those signs and all the people who are holding those signs as they scream at somebody else across a dividing line, and don’t listen at all to what they hear back. We have gone straight from indifference and silence to screaming at each other. That’s where we are now. Polarised media, whether it’s printed or broadcast media, or whether it’s social media, we just know what we think, and we are surrounded by echo chambers of people that think like us and resonate with us, pushing us further and further to the extreme.
And then occasionally, we get paired in combat circles online where we’re pushed to like scream at each other and try to score points. I think my father would’ve hated it. I don’t think that that’s democracy at its best, and I don’t think that that’s what my father was shooting for when he asked people to not be silent and not be indifferent. I don’t think he wanted us fuming mad at each other to the point that we couldn’t listen. My father believed in bridge building. My father was friends, not just acquaintances. He had friends on both sides of the political aisle in the United States. He had friendships with Republicans, he had friendships with Democrats. He was a welcome guest in the administration of every president since Carter. He would sit and dine with presidents. And my father did not want to be partisan. My father felt that we were better than that. So that is my reaction. I think that the need for the ability to have competing ideas and discuss them without the hatred, the emotion, the desire to rip each other apart. This is what I desire when I think about my father’s legacy and how I feel it’s been misinterpreted.
Is it a legacy that has passed? In other words, are we in a position whereby that glorious ability to be able to debate rationally and engage thoughtfully has gone? Or is there still a hope that it’ll come back? Your father clearly had great hope. I mean, in every there was always hope at the end of the day.
I don’t think it’s…
Of us who feel very gloomy are looking for hope.
I don’t think it’s gone. I feel that it’s a question of how we set up our goals and how we measure ourselves. And I think that, you know, all I can tell you is what I sort of try to do on my own. And, you know, there’s a great story. There’s a Hasidic story. I’m trying to remember if it’s about The Besht or not. There there’s some rav. And the rav had some, he had a lecture on middos, character, that he wanted to broadcast to the big shul in town. And he went on Shabbos morning and he tried to broadcast it, and he discovered people weren’t listening. Everybody was arguing. People weren’t talking. They couldn’t hear. So he’s like, okay, you know what? This didn’t work. I’m going to go tell this drash that I want to give, this about middos and the importance of character. I’m going to give it instead to, you know, maybe I’ll give it to the shul when it’s quieter. I’ll do it after a weekday mincha or something, when there’s just only 10, 20 people. And you know what? People were still not paying so much attention. It’s okay. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go to my shtiebel, the small shtiebel where I grew up and where everyone is respectful. And even there, people didn’t listen to him. So I said, oi, what am I going to do? Okay, I know. Friday night at the dinner, at the Shabbos dinner, I’m going to talk about it with my family. I’m going to talk about the importance of character with my family. His kids were arguing. His wife was busy looking at the watch.
We have to get to the main course. What are you doing? Even his own family didn’t listen. He said, ah, you know what I’m going to do? I’m just going to work on this myself. And he did. He worked on his own middos. And what he discovered is that then people started listening. So I’m going to tell you how I approach it and, like, what I have set up for myself, not because I think it may, I don’t know, who knows? Maybe you’ll hear something and you’ll be inspired to find your own way. I used to keep, almost count. I would keep score in my head of all the different political conversations I was having and how many I won, and how many I lost. And if I felt I lost one, I’d have to go do more research and come back more knowledgeable and study. And if the ones that I won, I’d go tell my friends about it. Ah, I beat that guy in an argument. And I realised instead, I’m going to set up a different metric. I will consider myself to have won a political conversation if I walk away from the conversation feeling closer to the person I spoke to. I’ve only been doing it for half a year, but I can tell you I feel better in here. I don’t know if it’s changing the world at all, but I feel better with that as my metric for success. Sorry, that was very long-winded. I apologise.
No, no, no, no. And that story, by the way, the way I heard it, sorry, before I hand it to David, was about the rabbi who wanted to change the world, and where do you start? So it’s exactly the same. Thank you so much. David.
No, thank you so much, Elisha. That’s really powerful. Just to ask you, just to take what you were saying a bit further and on a sort of broader, I suppose, historical trajectory, not only the last sort of four or five years globally, not only in America, do you think that you and your dad, do you think that if the Holocaust happened, if that kind of event happened once, that it could happen again to the Jews?
Well, to the Jews, thank God, no, because we have and we have Israel. We have an army today. So, no, yeah, never, never again.
[David] Never again.
It won’t happen, it won’t happen. But thank God. But it comes at great cost. You listen on Yom HaZikaron, the siren wail, and you realise the cost we pay to have that insurance, that Jewish soldiers are killed, Jewish victims of terrorism living in the state of Israel. There’s a tremendous cost to it, but thank God we have the state of Israel.
Do you think that a wind of history could come to really try and take that on in terms of another kind of holocaust?
Do I think that there are existential threats to Israel? Yes, of course I do.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I guess also, just on a different tangent, you know, in terms of bridge building, can I ask you what you feel about, you know, sons or daughters of the SS or camp commanders, or people meeting sons and daughters of survivors, what your thoughts are?
Why not? Look, my father addressed the German parliament, you know, at the Bundestag. I feel like it was either in the late 90s or early 2000s, and he addressed them. And what did he say at the Bundestag? He said, you know, the children of killers are children. Not killers. I don’t think that we should have a fight with the children of killers. I think that, you know, Germany as a country has, I think, tried in many ways to move forward. And I think it’s a new generation there. And I don’t think you can hold the son guilty for the crimes of the father.
Okay. Thank you. And I guess- Sorry, Dennis, go first.
No, no. Finish off.
Yeah, I guess the last thing I wanted to bring too, a second to last thing is, you know, your dad as an educator, as you mentioned early on, educator, as a man of religion, survivor, you know, so many of all these qualities and his sense of himself as a writer. Could you speak a bit about that?
Look, my father loved to write. It was just part of who he was, you know. When he’d wake up from a night of not having slept well, he would get a cup of coffee, instant coffee, by the way. I could never get him to switch to better coffee. It was what he picked up after the war, and he was a creature of habit. He would go in his robe and he would, you know, hammer out a dozen, two dozen pages of copy of whatever he was working on that morning. My father, you know, transitioned slowly from the world of the manual typewriter to the electric typewriter, finally to the Word processor. But he still always typed with two fingers, hunting and pecking, never learned to touch type. And it was a big part of who he was.
So he’d liked to see himself quite strongly as a writer as well, bearing witness, but also writing and reading others and, you know, other writers in a sense.
Look, I think there’s two fundamental differences. There’s two types of writing that my father did. There was writing as a witness in which I would include “Night.” I would include his memoirs. I would include “The Jews of Silence.” And then there was writing to be a storyteller under which I include his Hasidic writings, under which I include his fiction. My father loved to do both, and they were very different activities.
Yeah. Great. Okay, thank you. Dennis, you had one-
No, no, I’m not. I think we need to go to the questions.
[David] Yeah. Okay, thank you.
Q&A and Comments:
- Yes, I have here. And we did agree that we’d do that for 15 minutes. So I’ll try to get through as many as we can. Betty asks Elisha, I’ll read out people’s names.
Q: What is your mother’s background? Is she also a Holocaust survivor? How did they meet?
A: Great question. We just honoured my mother’s 90th birthday recently.
Mazel tov.
A big fundraiser that Wendy really helped us with. So thank you so much, Wendy, for the you showed my mom. But my mom is 90, she grew up in Vienna. She remembers the standing there with her father as the Nazis marched in. She was a refugee all across Europe, ending up in a camp called Gurs, which thankfully she and her sister and mother escaped before all the occupants were sent to Auschwitz. She was in hiding in Marsai. An Italian tailor and his wife kept them in hiding in the attic. And I’m pleased to say that only last week, we finally got confirmation from Yad Vashem that that tailor and his wife are now going to be honoured as righteous Gentiles in Yad Vashem’s museum. And from there, my mother lived in Basel. She hid out there. She spent the rest of the war in Basel. Thankfully they had Swiss family. And then from Basel to the United States, she met my father in the 60s. They were introduced at a party in Manhattan. And that’s the quick summary. But my mom is an incredible person in her own right. And her work on behalf of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel is really second to none.
Q: That’s fabulous. Arlene asks, are you in any way working with college students in regard to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments, which are currently in fashion?
A: Yeah, so I’m wearing this shirt of a nonprofit I’m involved with called Zioness. And what Zioness does is we are reclaiming the space on college campuses and elsewhere. But colleges, obviously, one of the major points of the anti-Zionist fight. We had found that Jews were being excluded from progressive spaces, particularly if you supported Israel. There had become this questioning of, you know, well, we’d love to see you run for, you know, college campus council, but we see you’re Jewish. Do you support Israel? Because if you can’t, that’s going to make it really hard. Believe it or not, that was happening on American campuses at the Gay Pride march in Chicago two years ago. You know, a group wearing a Jewish flag and the rainbow flag together were told they had to leave because the Israeli symbol, the Magen David was triggering people who were sympathetic with Palestinians.
You can’t believe, you can’t make this stuff up. Remember the head of the Women’s March in the United States, you know, one of them, Linda Sarsour or Tamika Mallory, they were saying things like, feminists can’t be Zionists. Try telling that to my mother. Okay. Try telling my mother you can’t be a feminist and the Zionist, you know, and you won’t last very long. So this organisation is brand new. I just started it. And the idea is that we’re going to make Jews feel confident in their Zionism, and that they can show up for social justice and that they don’t have to choose. It’s ridiculous to have to choose between your belief that the Jews deserve a homeland of our own, and the idea that you can be for social justice. So yes, I’m definitely involved and it’s a big priority.
- I’m skipping through some, because you’ve answered a few. I apologise to people.
Q: Howard, can you comment on Iran being elected the UN Council On Women’s Rights and the fact that at least four EU nations had voted for this, and the US is silent about it?
A:I mean, and then you have the UN Human Rights Council. I mean, don’t stop there.
Oh, yes.
Look, you’ve got it. You look at Human Rights Council and something like the majority of criticisms levied by the Human Rights Council are all in Israel. Forget Syria, forget Iran, forget Pakistan and Cameroon. You still have slave trading of people with dark skin in some of these countries and that doesn’t get the attention of anybody relative to Israel. The UN is frankly and sadly a joke in the way that it’s been constructed. For those of you who don’t follow UN Watch led by Hillel Neuer, it’s a fantastic organisation, and I highly recommend watching it, because he’s continually exposing the fraud at the centre of the UN and the way it’s composed. And I must say, I’m very grateful. I know people here will have mixed feelings on politics, but I will tell you that I have never seen an ambassador, a US ambassador to the UN like what we had with Nikki Haley. She was unbelievable the way she would tell the UN what’s what, when the next anti-Israel resolution would come up, these anti sites, you know, going after us all the time. So I saw that as one of the brightest moments of the Trump administration was Nikki Haley’s position early on.
Can I ask you-
[Dennis] Yeah, sorry.
Q: Sorry, Dennis. If I can just come, there’s a question from Myra, and there’s a lot of comments here and questions from people who are also children of survivors, which is very profound and thoughts here. From Myra to ask you, Elisha, how do you feel… Sorry, how do you or how will you communicate your family’s history to your children?
A: God, it’s a great question. I’ve taken a different talk with my kids. I think about the fact that the amazing thing to remember about The Shoah is we can spend all of this time talking about how these people died. And we only spend 1/10 of the energy thinking about how they lived. And in particular, what do I mean? They were Jews, they were Yiddishkeit. So I had chosen to put 10x of the focus on actually living Yiddishkeit in our home, and only 1/10 on The Shoah. I’m not saying we don’t ever talk about it. We do, of course. Of course, there are moments where it makes sense to talk about it. But for me, much more important is that every morning, every weekday morning I put on with my son. He’s bar mitzvah. We . We put on . We even sing a little song at the end. We do together every Friday night. When I grew up with my dad, we did a quick . He said, for Jewish men, that was it for the singing around the table. The Shabbos dinner table that I had built with my wife and my kids, we sing and we sing , and we do and we actually have a great kiddush and I bench the kids. I do the on the kids. And at the end of it all, we do a full . Don’t miss a word. That is what my kids are going to remember. They are going to remember a Shabbos dinner table of joy, of light, that we’re all together, that we have friends, and that there’s debate and discussion and singing. That is going to make a bigger difference to them in their desire, forget their ability, their desire to perpetuate Yiddishkeit, their literacy with what it means to be a practising Jew than all of the darkness I can show them about what The Shoah was.
- Is this done before-
Q: That is beautiful and so powerful ‘cause Darrel just follows that up with how was your mother able to soothe the demons?
A: I want to answer Dennis’ question and then I’ll go to the question you just asked. So Dennis was asking, when did all that start? Look, I had as I told you earlier to Judaism escalated much more like the birth of my son and the brit milah, that was kind of a moment. When my father passed, that was a very big moment, the year of Kaddish. And incrementally, you know, it’s funny because I married my wife who’s reformed, and she feels cheated in some way. And I understand it, because she said, I married you when you were a secular Jew, which is exactly what my mom used to tell my dad ‘cause my dad got more religious as I grew up, as I had brit milah and bar mitzvah. And, you know, I get accused of creeping Judaism by both my wife and my mother, and I understand it. But this all really just got more and more intense as I realised that the window to give my kids insight on how to live as a Jew in a way that is joyful, that that window is shrinking every day. And I only have them at home for so many years. And it is the single most important project in my life.
Sorry, David. You want to-
More important than all the human rights, more important than making money, more important for me that my kids should grow up immersed in Yiddishkeit and Judaism, being proud and joyful in it. Most important thing. Okay, then there was a question about how does my mother soothe her own demons? You know, I wish we could have gotten my mom to write more, because I think writing soothes, but we did interview her for this 90th birthday fundraiser that we threw. And I think that it was meaningful for her to do that. My mother immersed herself in the modern world. My mother loves film. My mother loves the goings and comings of the modern world. She always reads the paper cover to cover. So my mother has found sort of her own way to move forward.
Q: Okay. And then there’s question from Monica. What is one thing you can tell us about your father that might surprise us?
A: My father had a great sense of humour.
Great.
You know, it’s interesting.
Did he like Groucho or?
Who did he like? Lots of Jewish comedians.
I’ll tell you. So, you know, my father. It’s interesting. In this day and age, when we’re so primed to be offended, to be triggered by humour because there’s so many sensitivities, my father, he would love watching “The Producers.”
He loved watching “The Producers.”
“Springtime for Hitler,” and my father is laughing. He’s loving it. He’s cracking up, you know, because he’s able to tell what’s humour and what’s not. My father also loved war movies. “The Guns of Navarone,” he loved seeing the Nazis get it. But he also loved humour and, you know, I think he was generally inclined to give artistic liberty to artists.
So he so really loved satire, like with Mel Brooks or Groucho and many of the others.
Yeah, yeah. He would watch Monty Python with me.
[Dennis] Very good.
[David] What was you and his favourite? Monty Python?
I think I got some chuckles out of him when I showed him “Life Of Brian.” I think I got some good chuckles.
The People’s Front of Judea. The Judean People’s Front. I mean, you know, we still argue like that amongst each other, Jews today.
[David] I know. Brilliant.
Q: Jonathan asked the question, do you think your upbringing is the child of a Holocaust survivor is typical of other secondary generation kids or survivors? Does it make you feel different?
A: I don’t know. I think every every everyone’s story is unique. I couldn’t dare speak for other children of survivors.
I’m just trying to think whether any others that I- David, if you pick up anything, please just feel free.
Sure. I’m just going through here.
Very complimentary. Thank you very much. All sorts of people.
Someone asked about my name.
Q: Yes, your name. People asked about your name. Yes.
A: Yeah. So it’s not Alicia, A-L-I-C-I-A. That is a girl’s name. It’s Elisha, which is, he was the disciple of Eliyahu, of Elijah the prophet. If you look up in the Bible, you’ll see there was Elijah. And then one day it was time for Elijah to move on and find a disciple, and Elisha was that disciple. I was named, however, because my mother was a huge fan of “The Brothers Karamazov,” and she loved the character Ilyusha, the youngest of the brothers who became a priest. But my father didn’t want a Russian name. He wanted a Hebrew name. So they compromised on Elisha 'cause it’s close to Ilyusha.
And did your dad also love Kafka, Dostoevsky, all of those-
Loved Kafka, Dostoevsky. My father lived at the intersection of Tolstoy, Kafka, Dostoevsky and also Spinoza and Rambam, and Rambam and Rashi. He solidly planted in the world of Western literature and the world of Jewish literature.
Q: Did you study any, by the way?
A: I wish I had. And he was often angry that the yeshiva that I went to, he was like, I can’t believe they gave you the most boring text. Why couldn’t they give you something? So now I must say one of the great joys of my life is I’m doing the Daf Yomi programme, which is of Talmud every day. It’s a seven-year cycle and it has been such a rich treasure trove. I get to spend my days now with these incredible ravs talking about anything and everything under the sun. You go from moments of hyper precision on a legal issue to the wildest, fancy and imagination and story. I feel very blessed to be able to do that with my friends.
Indeed. Indeed.
And my father, I wish he was here, because I- And sometimes I hear him as we get into a conversation. I wish I could have done that with him.
So one final question, because we’re coming up to the witching hour.
[Elisha] Yeah, and we should end on time.
Q: Yes. We’re going to end right now. And I’m going to just ask you this final question. Judith says, coming from an assimilated background and then making almost 35 years ago, I applaud your attitude about how to raise your kids with strong Jewish identity. How will you handle it if they were rebel like you, doing it growing up?
A: Great question. I’m sure I’m in for it because, boy, my daughter turned 13 and I’m already in for it all the time. But I’m going to hopefully do it the way my father did, with patience and with love and with a deep, deep confidence that it will end up being okay for our family and for the Jewish people.
Elisha Wiesel, thank you very, very much for my side. In an extraordinary art, you’ve been very generous of your time.
Dennis, David, thank you. And of course, Wendy, thank you.
Can I also say, Elisha, thank you so much. It’s been an incredible hour and thank you for your time and your generosity of spirit and incredible openness. It’s really so moving and so thought provoking. Just really, really thank you so much. And please, will you write your autobiography one day? Thank you.
Enjoy your skiing. Thank you to Wendy and to Dennis.
I’d like to jump in and say, too, to Elisha and to David and to Dennis, thank you very, very much for an incredible hour. Elisha, what remarkable parents you grew up with. I mean, your mom, so beautiful, smart and dynamic. And as you said earlier, I had the great privilege of participating on the 90th video. And your dad, your father, a giant amongst men. As you said, if I may quote you at your dad’s memorial service, my father raised his voice to presidents and prime ministers when he felt issues on the world stage demanded action. But those who knew him in private life had the pleasure of experiencing a gentle and devout man who was always interested in others and whose quiet voice moved them to better themselves. I will hear that voice for the rest of my life and hope and pray that I will continue to earn the unconditional love and trust he always showed me. That was so beautiful. And that’s exactly your dad. You know, we spent many, many precious and wonderful hours with your parents over the years. And I have to say, I’m looking forward to our families getting together when we are both back in New York. I spoke to your mom just yesterday, and I’m so looking forward to having her on Lockdown University. And she can tell her incredible story too, within the next weeks. Yeah.
Wendy, thank you. My family is blessed with your friendship. So thank you.
Absolutely, absolutely. And what I want to say to you, Elisha, I want to just quote what the foundation, the mission of your foundation, The Elie Wiesel Foundation is our mission is to combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice through international dialogues and youth focused programmes that promote acceptance, understanding and equality. And what I want to say to all our participants that are onto tonight and today, please, you know, visit the foundation, visit the website, and if you feel compelled to do so, please support them, because the Holocaust Foundation needs your support, needs our support. And Elisha, I look forward to, together your family and our family continuing this journey together.
Thank you so much, Wendy. And thank you to all of our guests today.
Thank you very, very much. Thank you to all of you. Thanks for joining us. All right, everybody. Good bye and good night. And I’ll see you for the week
Good night. Thank you.
After, Elisha, in New York. Take care. Night night everyone.