It Is Important to Have Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy

Just months after losing his investments with Madoff, Wiesel accepted $500,000 from Pastor John Hagee for a single speech. Addressing Hagee's congregation in San Antonio, Texas, Wiesel heaped praise on the Christian Zionist preacher who once described Hitler as a "half-breed Jew," then called him his "dear pastor" in a subsequent interview. Hagee's rants against gays and the indisputably antisemitic passages that prompted John McCain to rescind the preacher's endorsement during his 2008 presidential campaign were of little relevance to Wiesel as he scrambled to regain his fortune.

Around this time, Wiesel fell in with Shmuley Boteach, a self-styled celebrity rabbi who functioned as a liaison for Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. (Adelson began funding Wiesel's foundation in 2007 with a donation of $1 million). Boteach operated as Wiesel's de facto agent, arranging high-profile -- and likely high-paying -- speaking gigs with figures ranging from Baywatch star Pamela Anderson to Senator Ted Cruz. In return, the ethically tainted Boteach was able to bask in the presence of a man regarded with near-universal veneration.

I met Wiesel for a brief moment at New York University's Bronfman Center for Jewish Life in February 2014. He had just shared a stage with Boteach, Adelson and Paul Kagame, the Rwandan strongman whose M23 proxy militia helped fuel the Congolese genocide. During the event, which was as surreal as it was outrageous, Kagame's security team brutally ejected a lone audience member who took Wiesel's call to challenge injustice as a cue to rise from his seat in protest against the Rwandan dictator. Afterward, I approached Wiesel and asked him about his vehement support for Jewish settlers ejecting Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem. He told me to contact his office and shuffled away.

That July, Israel embarked on its most lethal operation to date against residents of the besieged Gaza Strip, destroying or damaging some 100,000 homes and killing over 2,200 people, including 551 children. At the height of the assault, a shockingly Islamophobic full-page ad appeared in the New York Times under the banner of Boteach's World Values Network non-profit, which has received substantial funding from Adelson.

"Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it's Hamas's turn," the ad declared. Hammering on the common pro-Israel myth that Palestinians do not value their children's lives as much as Israelis do, the ad denigrated the besieged residents of Gaza as "worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites." The text concluded with the signature of its author, Elie Wiesel, the man who would be eulogized by fellow Nobel Prize-winner Barack Obama as "one of the great moral voices of our time."

With Wiesel's death, the elites who relied on him for moral cover leapt at the opportunity to claim his legacy. Meanwhile, the teachings and testimonies of Holocaust survivors who insisted on applying the lessons of the genocide universally -- including to Palestinians -- remained confined to the margins.

Destroying the dissidents

Among the Jewish dissidents to emerge from the nightmare of World War Two Europe was Marek Edelman, a member of the Warsaw ghetto resistance who published an open letter to Palestinian resistance fighters during the Second Intifada, addressing them respectfully as "Palestinian Partisans" while beseeching them not to attack civilians. There was also Hajo Meyer, who spent months in Auschwitz, where he lost his parents, and spent his later years writing slashing critiques of the Zionist movement's base exploitation of the Holocaust.

Like Meyer, Hedy Epstein invoked her experience surviving genocide (she escaped on the kindertransport) to emphasize the urgency of her activism for Palestinian rights. In her final years, she embarked on an aid flotilla to the besieged Gaza Strip and participated in countless demonstrations for human rights, even getting arrested protesting police brutality in St. Louis, Missouri.

Many Israeli Jews who had fled Europe during the 1930's banded together in radical organizations like the Socialist Bund, Matzpen and the communist party known as Maki to challenge the military occupation of Palestinians that began inside Israeli territory in 1949. One of the earliest leaders of the Israeli Communist Party, Meir Vilner, used his position in the Knesset (Israel's parliament) to expose the massacre by Israeli soldiers of 47 innocent Palestinian farmers in 1956 in the town of Kfar Kassem, where Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had ordered a media blackout.

When these dissidents could not be ignored, they have been denigrated by pro-Israel forces as self-haters, race traitors and even frauds. This year, when the Austrian parliament invited Hedy Epstein to participate in an event on women survivors of the Holocaust, she was smeared by Efraim Zuroff, a self-styled "Nazi hunter" who headed the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office. "She is not a survivor in the classical sense," Zuroff claimed, suggesting that Epstein's support for Palestinian rights nullified her experience of escaping genocide. The Jerusalem Post's Benjamin Weinthal piled on, painting Epstein as a "pro-Hamas, anti-Israel Jew" and attempting to link her to Iranian Holocaust deniers. As a result of the pressure, the parliamentary event was canceled. Epstein died three months later at age 91.

On the day of Wiesel's death, those who took a critical view of his legacy were subjected to the same wrath as the survivors who challenged the segregationist principle he represented. Condemning his anti-Palestinian tirades was painted by right-wing and pro-Israel outlets as tantamount to Holocaust denial, and invited a torrent of incitement and death threats transmitted through social media. (A quick browse through my Twitter interactions will show an almost endless stream of disturbing imprecations).

With Elie Wiesel gone, his most zealous defenders have set out to destroy those who embraced the message he espoused in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, but which he ultimately failed to uphold: "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant."