Elie Wiesel

Teacher, Mentor, and Friend

Alan L. Berger, Berger

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532649523
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito religioso

Elie Wiesel, plucked from the ashes of the Holocaust, became a Nobel Peace laureate, an activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, an award-winning novelist, and a renowned humanist. He moved easily among world leaders but was equally at home among the disenfranchised. Following his Nobel Prize, Wiesel established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity; one of their early initiatives was the founding of the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay Contest.The reflections in this volume come from judges of the contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel, providing a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future seems ominous and chaotic at best, these reflections hold on to the promise of an ethically and morally robust possibility. The students whose essays prompt this sense of hope are remarkable for their insight and dedication.The messages embedded in the judges' reflections mirror Wiesel's convictions about the importance of friendship, the need to interrogate (without abandoning) God, and the power of remembrance in order to fight indifference.

1

The Elie Wiesel Ethics Contest

Twenty-Five Years of Reading Students’ Essays and Being the Better for It

Judith Ginsberg

As we say in America, “Time flies when you are having fun.” It is hard for me to believe that I began reading essays for the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay Contest over twenty-five years ago.

My husband and I and first met Elie and Marion in the late 1980s when my husband was president of Hunter College, a twenty-thousand-student flagship institution of the City University of New York in New York City, all female until the 1970s. It is the only institution in America, or the world, to have graduated two (Jewish) women scientists, Gertrude Elion and Roslyn Yallow, who went on to win Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine.

My husband reached out to Elie in an attempt to lure him to a Distinguished Professorship at Hunter—he lived nearby and could have walked to work. But Elie was devoted to Boston University; he ended up teaching there for close to forty years, and to its charismatic president, John Silber. So, although he did not accept my husband’s offer of employment, we became friends and he later did graciously accept an honorary degree from Hunter, and to be the commencement speaker. That commencement speech was reprinted in Sunday newspaper supplements around the world and read by millions.

Around that time my husband and I also faced an ethical dilemma and we sought Elie’s advice, which he gave, in a typically wise and gentle way. Elie was very much taken with the then incipient Covenant Foundation that I was leading, with its goal of acknowledging and rewarding outstanding Jewish educators and supporting innovative new initiatives in this field. He asked me to serve on this readers’ committee, and he asked my husband, Paul LeClerc, to serve on the next committee up, the one to which the readers’ committee I am on forwards its top choices and that ultimately determines the winners with Elie and Marion. We were both deeply honored.

As we all know, Elie won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for, as the Nobel committee put it, serving as a “messenger to mankind,” who through his struggle to come to terms with “his own personal experience of total humiliation and the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps,” as well as his “practical work in the cause of peace.”1

And one of the things he and his beloved Marion did in short order was establish the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, whose mission is to combat indifference. As he so eloquently put it, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference, and the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”2

To pursue its mission the foundation established several programs. The first, initiated in 1988, was the magnificent conferences that bring together other Nobel laureates and world leaders to discuss and find solutions to world problems—peace, education, health, the environment, and terrorism. Another way the foundation pursues its goal is through the Beit Tzipora Centers for Enrichment in Israel, which operate in Ashkelon and Kiryat Malachi, serving close to a thousand people in the Ethiopian Jewish community. Named, I imagine, in memory of his beloved younger sister, Tzipora, lost in the Holocaust. What would little Tzipora have grown up to be?

And then we have the essay contest, which is where my colleagues Alan Berger, Barbara Helfgott Hyett, Carolyn Johnston, Henry Knight, David Patterson, John Roth, Alan Rosen, and I come in.

The foundation has supported, since 1989, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity’s Ethics Prize. It does so with its exclusive corporate partner, LRN, a remarkable company that works with and helps shape winning organizational cultures inspired by sustainable values in hundreds of companies around the world. The dynamic creator of LRN, Dov Seidman, is known for assisting companies and people to operate in both a principled and profitable way.

The Ethics Prize is awarded to the winners of an essay contest that challenges college juniors and seniors to analyze the urgent ethical issues confronting all of us in today’s complex world.

My colleagues and I are the readers of these essays. Elie himself said of the contest, “of all the projects we have initiated, none has been more exciting and rewarding than this opportunity to inspire young students to examine the ethical aspects of what they have learned in their personal lives and from their teachers in the classroom.”3

“The essays . . . show young people who are remarkably thoughtful and engaged with enduring questions; young people who are sensitive to the sufferings and defects that confront a society yearning for guidance and eager to hear ethical voices.”4

The contest is widely publicized on college campuses. Essays are submitted by students of engineering, biology, and nursing as well as students in more traditional humanities and social science fields. Some are returning students, older than twenty-two, some are veterans. Political science, history, and English majors feature prominently among the authors.

No more than three entries are accepted from any one campus, and a faculty advisor certifies the status of the essay writers and submits them to the foundation on their behalf. I mention that only three submissions are permitted from any particular campus because in 2015 two submissions from the same institution, The United States Merchant Marine Academy, won prizes. How did that happen? None of the readers has any connection to this venerable institution. In fact, all essays are sent to the readers without the name or academic institution of the author. They are only identified by numbers.

Sometimes we readers notice a cluster of essays devoted to the same book or the same current event or question of the day, so we suppose that they might all be from the same class. But this suspicion does not impede our impartiality, which is complete and absolute. We work like contemporary orchestras who now audition musicians behind a curtain and with a carpeted floor so as not to see or hear footsteps (as in the case of high heels) of the musician auditioning. As a result, in the music world we now have women and minorities at many formerly all-white-male bastions. This blind system has yielded prize-winning essays from prestigious, Ivy League, Big Ten, and elite liberal arts institutions such as Harvard, Brown, Yale, Duke, Northwestern, Williams, and Stanford, to be sure, but also winners from more modest, less well-known institutions, such as Jamestown College, Otterbein College, the College of the Ozarks, Berea College, Olivet Nazarene University, and Colorado State University–Pueblo, an institution to which I will return a bit later. In short, there is talent everywhere that the contest acknowledges and promotes.

Back in the ’90s, hard copies of the essays would arrive in large boxes during the break between Christmas and New Years. I always felt a thrill of anticipation! Now, everything is done online, with the University of Oregon smoothly orchestrating the process. Although I don’t miss all the paper and the clutter, I still look forward to reading each new essay, hoping it will be one of the ones that will blow me away! To be honest, they are not all brilliant, but there are, indeed, truly brilliant ones.

Each reader starts with a unique group of thirty or so essays from which he or she selects the ten best ones. Then everyone reads, with a partner, everyone else’s top ten. Let me add a comment here about our partners. I have worked with several during the twenty-five years of the contest. I have seen eye to eye with some and not with others. Although all of my colleagues are distinguished people of accomplishment and judgment who had strong ties to Elie. For the last many years, however, I have had the distinct pleasure, another honor really, to work with John K. Roth, a magnificent scholar and teacher, and, as I have come to know from our telephone conversations (I never actually see him), a kind and caring person and an astute reader.

From this group of eighty essays, the four pairs of readers on a conference call together select and rank the top ten, which are sent to the committee I mentioned previously, which, along with Elie and Marion, determines the prize recipients. Perhaps their son, Elisha, will now take part in making these decisions.

There are a first, second, and third prize as well as two honorable mentions. The prizes are generous: $5,000 to the first prize; $2,500 to the second. The Third prize is $1,500; and two honorable mentions each receive $500.

And by my calculation of one hundred essays read each year, I and my colleagues have now read some 2,500 of them.

And what do the young essayists write about? How do they present ethical concerns? For many years we readers would tweak various assigned topics for them, including historical ones, personal ones, and literary ones, and ones they could base on current events. They often chose terrible ones, such as Bosnia, Rwanda, the Argentinian mothers of “disappeared” children of t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Elie Wiesel Ethics Contest
• Chapter 2: Is It Possible to Be Seated and Yet to Dance?
• Chapter 3: Moments of Grace
• Chapter 4: When the Rainbow Breaks . . .
• Chapter 5: The Impact of Elie Wiesel
• Chapter 6: Capturing the Fire, Envisioning the Redemption
• Chapter 7: Elie Wiesel
• Chapter 8: Elie Wiesel and Interfaith Dialogue
• Afterword
• Contributors