Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, by Mark Chmiel

The 1960 publication of Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, marked a major turning point in the American consciousness of what we now call the Holocaust. A man of faith angry with God's and the Allies' absence from Auschwitz, Wiesel created a vision of meaning that stressed not only remembrance but also the moral duty to act against present-day enormities. Yet in a world replete with repression and plagued by outbreaks of genocide, how, when and for whom should one act? These questions have vexed everyone who has a social conscience. So have the contradictions, ambiguities and unintended consequences that so often attend the translation of moral imperative into concrete policy.

Mark Chmiel attempts to analyze Wiesel's own response to repression and genocide. When Chmiel first read Night as a college student it sharply "interrogated" his  "youthful sense of Christian innocence." Now adjunct professor of theological studies at St. Louis University and of religious studies at Webster University, Chmiel returns the favor by interrogating Wiesel's record of "moral leadership," and especially his "solidarity" with suffering peoples around the world. Wiesel flunks Chmiel's solidarity test, emerging mostly as a lackey of American and Israeli interests. Unfortunately, Chmiel's earnest but morally obtuse exploration of the limits of Wiesel's solidarity with suffering peoples sounds the fashionably Manichean tones of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, from whom Chmiel seems to have received most of his political education.

One might have expected more. Wiesel's meteoric rise from obscurity in postwar France to spokesperson for Jewish survivors and Nobel Peace laureate has brought in its train enormous and sometimes contradictory demands to address a vast number of issues, past and present. Wiesel became an advocate not only for the Jewish victims of the Nazis but also for those whose lives were threatened by genocidal actions around the world. He who was most at home as a philosopher and mystic felt drawn to the public stage and the enormous audience it gained for his witness and vision.