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Elie Wiesel as an American phenomenon and a family man
How do you tell a story that everyone knows? Oren Rudavsky, in the opening scenes of his recently released documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, makes the wise decision to begin his film not through the known facts about Wiesel or the Holocaust, but through a more internal logic of art and dreams.
As Wiesel narrates a dream, we see Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animation of dark figures succumbing to a rising river of blood, leaving the dreamer alone to try to rescue his drowning father. Fingers grasp at bodies as they slip under.
“I don’t know what power aided me,” we hear Wiesel say. “All I know is that I managed to save him all by myself.” As anyone who has read Night knows, Wiesel’s father succumbed to dysentery in Buchenwald. That Elie could not save his father, his wife Marion tells us, was the abiding wound he always carried.
Dreams, in Freud’s view, are wish fulfillments. But this dream-act of (temporary) reanimation also expresses Wiesel’s conviction that the dead are not entirely gone if they are remembered. That may be the redemptive vision that drives Rudavsky, as well. The implicit hope that the dead may be saved opens the film and breaks into full voice at its ending, with Wiesel beautifully singing the messianic anthem “Ani Ma’amin” from the stage of the 92nd Street Y.
As he sings, his face gives way to a lush, grassy landscape rushing by as if we’re passengers on a train, while his voice fades into a choral arrangement. In moving past Wiesel’s face and voice, the film embodies and fulfills Wiesel’s belief that the Jewish story will continue, on PBS as in his family line.
For all its focus on European catastrophe and Jewish longings, the documentary casts Elie Wiesel as an “American Master,” the title of the larger PBS series. Wiesel is an American phenomenon, read in classrooms around the country and, for a time, in the White House. Full disclosure: I appear briefly in the film, discussing the reception of Wiesel’s work and the difference between the Yiddish title of his best-known work, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world kept silent) and the French/English title of its translation, La Nuit (Night).
One of the film’s extended sequences captures a moment that saw Wiesel at the center of American politics and the global stage, when he passionately implored President Reagan to cancel a planned visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg, once it had become known that Waffen-SS soldiers were buried there. “That place is not your place,” Wiesel says on national TV, with Reagan looking on. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
Details less engraved on collective memory emerge from Rudavsky’s film: the shared friendship both men describe, the attempts behind the scenes to ameliorate the clash, Wiesel’s insistence that he was making no claims about German collective guilt. “Only the killers were guilty,” he said.
This episode establishes Wiesel’s courage and role as a preeminent moral voice of his time. Less clear is the trajectory from the solitary writer in postwar Paris to the man who came to represent the Holocaust experience, when his novel/memoir Night became required reading.
One of the brilliant 13-year-old students who discuss the novel in their Newark classroom suggests such an analysis, in distinguishing between the Eliezer of the story and Elie Wiesel, its famous author. In America and elsewhere, Wiesel became so closely associated with Holocaust memory that the Eliezer/Elie distinction, or alternatives to his distinctive voice, are hardly imaginable.
Not one but two stories drive Rudavsky’s documentary: one of unimaginable catastrophe and loss; and another of privilege and success — both Wiesel’s own stature and the broader rise of the American Jewish community in which this story is embedded. How these two narratives are related is a tale that remains to be told.
And yet, alternatives to Wiesel’s powerful voice are heard in the film. Remarkably enough, they emerge from Wiesel’s own family. Marion Wiesel, who married the war-haunted bachelor when he was 40, recounts that her husband had insisted “from the beginning that he didn’t want children.” And then she adds: “I convinced him.”
Photographs of her during those years as a bride and new mother radiate, and we see the hint of a smile on her husband’s mournful visage. As an old woman, she commands attention. Against the widespread veneration of Wiesel’s pronouncements, she shows herself at least occasionally unpersuaded. Describing Wiesel’s growing religiosity, she comments drily, “I was the pagan in the family.” Served a latke at a family Hanukkah celebration that could easily be played for sentimentality (“the Jewish people live!”), she sniffs: “Doesn’t look like a latke.”
Marion Wiesel’s acerbic tone is particularly welcome as commentary on a topic of increasingly pressing concern. Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, asserts that he is sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians, “but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.” Marion comments: “He didn’t want to criticize Israel under any circumstance. He didn’t want to criticize the occupation. He didn’t want to criticize the settlers. He may not have agreed with them, but he didn’t want to criticize them. Ever.”
In contrast with the moral clarity of his words about Bitburg, what the film presents us with on this issue is a muddle, and if I am reading Marion right, a bit of a family dispute. In this way, the Wiesel family was no different from so many others.
So, too, does Rudavsky complicate Wiesel’s devotion to Jewish survival in focusing on the discomfort of Elisha Wiesel, the couple’s only son, in the role of living symbol of Jewish continuity. Cuddled on Jimmy Carter’s lap, called to the stage at Oslo, Elisha remembers chafing at being “just an appendage” to his famous father.
And yet, as the film ends, he, too, has embraced Judaism anew, laying tefillin on camera. Elisha’s son, Elijah, also takes up the imperative and burden of Holocaust memory, traveling to Sighet to visit his grandfather’s childhood home, now turned into a museum.
In a stirring scene, the Hebrew letters on the gravestone of his namesake — his great-grandfather — appear with growing clarity, illuminated by the trick of scraping shaving cream off the inscription (not recommended by conservators) and the magic of documentary film.
And yet, Elijah Wiesel with the waist-long hair is not the Eliyahu Vizel of the gravestone, just as Eliezer Vizel of Sighet is not quite the same as Elie Wiesel of Oslo and Boston. “Jewish continuity” is a bridge we narrate over the shifting sands of loss and change. The present, past, and future connect for a fleeting moment, only to drift apart like a dream, a film.
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This national park would honor a Jewish philanthropist — if Republicans get back on board
The political climate is hardly favorable for a new national park centered on racial justice.
President Donald Trump this week called for sweeping budget cuts to the National Park Service and, in January, for the removal of slavery-related exhibits he said portray American history in a “woke manner.”
Yet a campaign to establish a national historic park honoring Julius Rosenwald — the Jewish philanthropist who funded schools for rural Black communities during the Jim Crow era — is pressing ahead.
Dorothy Canter, who launched the campaign in 2018, sees an opening for the park to finally become a reality. In February, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced legislation to create the Rosenwald National Historic Park, backed by seven Democratic co-sponsors.
But advancing the bill out of committee — much less to President Trump’s desk — will require Republican support. At a time when even the mildest celebration of diversity can be deemed an excess of the “woke” left, Canter is betting that Rosenwald’s story will be the exception.
“The environment is not the best, obviously, but this is a story that should appeal to anyone,” Canter told the Forward. “This is a positive story. Nobody can say it’s DEI.”
Rosenwald’s Legacy
Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois, the son of German-Jewish immigrants. At 16, he dropped out of high school to pursue the family clothing business.
In 1895, he invested $37,500 in Sears, Roebuck & Company — a decision that would ultimately make him one of the wealthiest men in the United States in the early 20th century.
But guided by the Jewish value of tzedakah, he gave much of that fortune away. In 1911, he met Booker T. Washington, the formerly enslaved founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a training center for African American teachers. Washington urged Rosenwald to invest in Black education in the South.
Rosenwald would go on to help fund nearly 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states. By 1928, one in three Black students in the rural South attended a Rosenwald school. Alumni of Rosenwald schools would include congressman John Lewis, poet Maya Angelou and civil rights activist Medgar Evers.
Canter, a retired biophysicist and national parks enthusiast, first learned about Rosenwald as an adult through a documentary — and was struck that this story of Black-Jewish cooperation was not more widely known.
“I knew that there was not one national park unit among the more than 400 that commemorated the life and legacy of a Jewish American, or told the story of Rosenwald schools,” Canter said. “And I can tell you that today, almost 11 years later, that is still the case.”
There are national historic sites and monuments honoring Jewish Americans, including the Rosenwald family home and the David Berger National Memorial. But a national historic park — a designation that often spans multiple sites and has greater cultural cache — has yet to honor a Jewish American.
Part of Rosenwald’s relative obscurity, Canter said, stems from his own philosophy. Rosenwald embraced a “give while you live” approach and did not believe in permanent endowments, requiring that the Rosenwald Fund spend all of its money within 25 years of his death.
That approach has yielded severe financial challenges decades later. Today, only about 10% of the more than 5,000 Rosenwald school structures remain, according to Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The Trust placed Rosenwald schools on its 2002 list of America’s 11 most endangered historic places, warning of an “urgent crisis of erasure, abandonment and deterioration.”
Many of the schools were built in rural areas that have since been abandoned, Leggs said, adding that the buildings were made of wood that has slowly decayed. The loss is personal for him: Upon researching the history for his job, Leggs discovered that both of his parents attended Rosenwald schools in Kentucky.
“It was a transcendent moment for me,” he said, “because I remember being at a school building that was literally vanishing history.”
The surviving schools have mixed ownership, Leggs said. Some act as local community centers, while others operate as commercial or office spaces, such as the Caldwell Rosenwald School in Huntersville, North Carolina — today, home to Burgess Supply, a carpet store.
A bipartisan issue?
In the final days of his first presidency, Trump gave a significant boost to the campaign for a Rosenwald national park.
He signed the Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools Act into law, directing the Department of Interior to conduct a study assessing the feasibility of establishing the park. Eight Republicans had cosponsored the bill, and it passed with broad bipartisan support.
The study “resulted in positive findings,” concluding that the San Domingo School in Sharptown, Maryland, met all the criteria for a national park and recommending that Congress create a grant program to support the preservation of additional Rosenwald schools.
But Republican backing for a national park honoring Rosenwald’s legacy now appears to have waned.
The Forward called and emailed the three Republicans who cosponsored the 2020 bill and are still in office. None responded to the Forward’s question about their position on Durbin’s bill to establish the Rosenwald park.
A White House spokesperson directed the Forward to the national historic site at the Rosenwald family home but declined to say whether Trump was supportive of the national park commemorating Rosenwald schools.
Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican, went so far as to send a letter to President Joe Biden in 2024 expressing his support for “the expedited designation of a Julius Rosenwald And Rosenwald Schools National Park.”
His office did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
Nor did the office of Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who previously advertised his support for the restoration of Rosenwald schools in his state. “Booker T. Washington helped build thousands of schools for Black children, advancing impactful educational opportunities throughout the South,” he tweeted in February 2024. “With the restoration of Rosenwald School, his legacy lives on in South Carolina. #BlackHistoryMonth”
‘A story for our time’
Durbin’s bill arrives just as the agency that would create a park faces drastic proposed cuts: Trump this week proposed funding for the already understaffed National Park Service be reduced by $736 million, or 25% of its budget.
Meanwhile, the president has sought to recast historical narratives at existing parks. In January, Trump ordered the National Park Service dismantle an exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington. Earlier this month, the Trump administration directed the removal of a pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City.
Yet Rosenwald’s story doesn’t fit neatly into the culture-war themes that Trump has singled out. Rosenwald himself was a political conservative, a laissez-faire businessman and steadfast Republican who believed in fostering economic self-sufficiency through education.
Dennis Ross, a former Republican congressman from Florida who retired from office in 2019 and has supported the Rosenwald park campaign, told the Forward he sees Rosenwald’s story as one conservatives should embrace.
“I’ve heard the argument that this is a way of trying to backdoor DEI. I totally disagree and take issue with that. This is showing what American history is all about,” Ross said. “If you were to dwell on the oppression of slavery, then maybe that argument might work. But I think the important thing is to look at the transition, the evolution from slavery to success.”
Canter is also optimistic, and said she plans to meet with a Republican senator — she declined to provide a name — whose staff has expressed interest in the park. As to whether Trump would sign the bill: She hopes the campaign will have the opportunity to put it on his desk.
“People with different backgrounds and cultures were able to come together, work together, find common ground and move this country forward,” Canter said. “So if that isn’t a story for our time, I don’t know what is.”
The post This national park would honor a Jewish philanthropist — if Republicans get back on board appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Says Gas Prices May Remain High Through November Midterm Election
U.S. President Donald Trump takes questions from reporters while Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio look on, as they attend a meeting with oil industry executives, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 9, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the price of oil and gasoline may remain high through November’s midterm elections, a rare acknowledgement of the potential political fallout from his decision to attack Iran six weeks ago.
“It could be, or the same, or maybe a little bit higher, but it should be around the same,” Trump, who is in Miami for the weekend, told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” when asked whether the cost of oil and gas would be lower by the fall.
The average price for regular gas at US service stations has exceeded $4 per gallon for most of April, according to data from GasBuddy. Trump’s comments on Sunday came after weeks of asserting that the spike in prices is a short-term phenomenon, though his top advisers are cognizant of the war’s economic impacts, officials have said.
Earlier on Sunday, Trump announced on social media that the US Navy would blockade the Strait of Hormuz and intercept any ship that paid a crossing fee to Iran, after marathon talks between the US and Iran in Pakistan over the weekend did not yield a peace deal.
“No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Any US blockade is likely to add more uncertainty to the eventual resolution of the conflict, which is currently subject to a tenuous two-week ceasefire. The new tactic is in response to Iran’s own closure of the strait’s critical shipping lanes, which has caused global oil prices to skyrocket about 50%.
UNPOPULAR WAR HITS TRUMP’S APPROVAL
The war began on February 28, when the US launched a joint bombing campaign with Israel against Iran. The scope quickly expanded as Iran and its allies attacked nearby countries, while Israel targeted Hezbollah with massive strikes in Lebanon.
The war has buffeted global financial markets and caused thousands of civilian deaths, mostly in Iran and Lebanon.
Trump’s political standing at home has suffered, with polls showing the war is unpopular among most Americans, who are frustrated by rising gasoline prices.
The president’s approval rating has hit the lowest levels of his second term in office, raising concern among Republicans that his party is poised to lose control of Congress in the midterm elections. A Democratic majority in either chamber could launch investigations into the Trump administration while blocking much of his legislative agenda.
US Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned the strategy behind Trump’s planned blockade.
“I don’t understand how blockading the strait is going to somehow push the Iranians into opening it,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
In a separate appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Warner said the blockade would not undermine Iranian control of the waterway.
“The Iranians have hundreds of speedboats where they can still mine the strait or put bombs against tankers in closing the strait,” he said. “How is that going to ever bring down gas prices?”
Although Trump has repeatedly said that the war would be over soon, Republican US Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday that achieving US aims in Iran “could take a long time.”
“It’s going to be a long-term project,” said Johnson, who was not asked about Trump’s proposed blockade. “I never thought this would be easy.”
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Israel’s Ben-Gvir Visits Flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound
Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir walks inside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS
Israel’s far-right police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem on Sunday, saying he was seeking greater access for Jewish worshipers and drawing condemnation from Jordan and the Palestinians.
The compound in Jerusalem’s walled Old City is one of the most sensitive sites in the Middle East. Known to Jews as Temple Mount, it is the most sacred site in Judaism and is Islam’s third-holiest site.
Under a delicate, decades-old arrangement with Muslim authorities, it is administered by a Jordanian religious foundation and Jews can visit but may not pray there.
Suggestions that Israel would alter the rules have sparked outrage among Muslims and ignited violence in the past.
“Today, I feel like the owner here,” National Security Minister Ben-Gvir said in a video filmed at the site and distributed by his office. “There is still more to do, more to improve. I keep pushing the Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) to do more and more — we must keep rising higher and higher.”
A statement from the Jordanian foreign ministry said it considered Ben-Gvir’s visit to be a violation of the status quo agreement at the site and “a desecration of its sanctity, a condemnable escalation and an unacceptable provocation.”
The office of Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said such actions could further destabilize the region.
Ben-Gvir’s spokesman said the minister was seeking greater access and prayer permits for Jewish visitors. He also said that Ben-Gvir had prayed at the site.
There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu’s office. Previous such visits and statements by Ben-Gvir have prompted Netanyahu announcements saying that there is no change in Israel’s policy of keeping the status quo.
Muslim, Christian and Jewish sites, including Al-Aqsa had been largely closed to the public during the Iran war. There was no immediate sign of unrest on Sunday after Ben-Gvir’s visit.