Elisha Wiesel: American Jews Are 'Less Safe Than When My Father Was Alive'

For Elisha Wiesel, son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the date that changed Jewish life in America was not October 7, 2023; it was October 8. The annual prize asks young people to wrestle with questions of conscience, responsibility and moral courage—the ideas around which his father built much of his life’s work. This year’s theme, “Silence, Conscience, and Responsibility,” makes the timing particularly fitting: Elisha Wiesel believes the years since October 7, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages, have revealed not only a resurgence of antisemitism, but a failure by some of the people and institutions entrusted with remembering where silence and indifference can lead.

Wiesel has spent much of his life in the shadow of, and increasingly the stewardship of, his father’s legacy. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, devoted his life to bearing witness to the Holocaust and warning what could happen when hatred was permitted to metastasize alongside indifference. Yet, he argued, the empathy that project cultivated “does not seem to have really translated.” “They have empathy for the dead Jews, not the living ones,” he said.

For Wiesel, that contradiction helps explain why October 8 matters so much. October 7 showed that Jews could still be slaughtered for being Jews. The reaction that followed, he believes, showed how quickly sympathy could curdle into suspicion of Israel and, eventually, of Jews themselves.

He describes the accusations now aimed at Israel as part of an ancient pattern. They are corrupt and accuse us of being corrupt.” Now, he said, Jews are being described as genocidal after October 7 (the death toll of Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza has surpassed 74,000, according to the , citing the Gaza Health Ministry). Wiesel also thinks Jewish institutions need to become considerably less timid.

He pointed specifically to institutions devoted to Holocaust memory, arguing that organizations willing to take moral positions on atrocities elsewhere should not retreat from the contemporary debate surrounding Israel. Some of his criticism is directed inward. Wiesel believes Jewish communities have allowed an increasingly common depiction of Jews as uniformly white and colonial to go insufficiently challenged.

Jewish education, he argued, cannot end with Holocaust museums and books about prejudice. Young Jews should be encountering Jewish communities in Israel and around the world and understanding that Jewish identity does not fit neatly into America’s racial categories. Wiesel believes the partisan sorting of Israel has increasingly encouraged American Jews to understand themselves through party affiliation before Jewish identity.