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.

The post Elie Wiesel as an American phenomenon and a family man appeared first on The Forward.

Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons

I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which  there is no cure.

Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.

There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.

I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.

It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.

Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.

This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.

The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.

It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.

There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.

The author is a writer based in New York.

Tens of thousands joined the National March Against Antisemitism in London, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect

Earlier this month, Bret Stephens delivered the “State of World Jewry” address. At the risk of oversimplifying his speech, Stephens’ message was a somber pivot: the millions of dollars spent fighting antisemitism are largely wasted. We cannot “cure” the world of this hatred. Instead, we should spend those resources strengthening Jewish identity — funding Jewish day schools, summer camps, and building a fortress of internal resilience.

On Sunday, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism continued their diametrically opposite approach. During the Super Bowl, they ran an ad featuring a Black student showing allyship to a Jewish student who is being bullied. The message is optimistic: Education, awareness, and cross-cultural empathy can win the day.

One strategy is retreat and fortify; the other is reach out and persuade.

I believe both are destined to fail.

Stephens is right that we cannot logic our way out of hate, but his solution surrenders the public square. Kraft is noble in his pursuit of allyship, but his solution relies on empathy that simply may not exist in large enough quantities.

There is a third path. It does not rely on Jewish introspection, nor does it beg for non-Jewish affection. It relies on universal enforcement.

The Failure of “Particularism”

If you poll Americans on how they feel about “antisemitism” (or its modern fraternal twin, “anti-Zionism,” which is a label that now mostly serves as a cover for Jew-hatred), the results are messy. Resistance to these specific bigotries is not universal; it is partisan, generational, and fraught with “context.”

However, if you poll Americans on the universal moral taboos — overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence — the consensus is overwhelming. Even in our divided era, I am certain that more than 90% of the country agrees that persecuting a racial or religious group or celebrating violence is socially unacceptable.

This is the strategic flaw in both the Stephens and Kraft approaches: They treat antisemitism as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.

But we don’t need a “Jewish” solution. We need a universal solution, and fortunately one already exists.

The most effective way to protect the Jewish community is to stop asking society to protect Jews specifically, and start demanding society protect civilization generally and all of its people equally.

We must broaden the fight. We recruit the entire country not to defend Jews against Jew-hatred, but to defend the core American value that all overt hatred is an inadmissible taboo.

When we make the standard universal, we strip away the “exceptions.” If society agrees that “dehumanization is a firing offense,” then a person dehumanizing a Zionist must be fired the same as if they dehumanized Black or gay Americans — not because the employer loves Zionists or Black or LGBT people, but because the employer fears tolerating and normalizing these taboos of hate regardless of the group being targeted.

To do this, we must re-acquaint the mainstream with the concept of moral taboos.

As Jonathan Haidt explored in The Righteous Mind, true moral taboos are not intellectual; they are visceral. We don’t debate whether incest is wrong; we recoil from it. We need to restore that same visceral recoil to bigotry and the endorsement of violence, which largely exists, but then we must re-familiarize society with the mechanism for enforcing taboos: social consequences.

Stephens gives up on the outer world. Kraft tries to persuade it with carrots. The Third Path uses the stick of social ostracism. Social consequences are society’s immune response. When the immune system is working, a “Rejoicer” who cheers for violence is expelled from the body politic — not by law, but by consensus.

The Binary Choice

While restoring these taboos sounds like a generational challenge, the alternative makes the choice obvious.

We are either going to restore these universal guardrails — punishing those who egregiously violate them, just as we did to the KKK — or we will allow hate to be normalized until it spills over into political violence that no amount of Jewish Day Schools or Super Bowl ads can stop.

We don’t need to beg the world for its affection, nor should we retreat into a fortress. We need to remind the world that the taboos which protect us are the same ones that hold civilization together. If we lead the fight to restore those universal standards, we won’t just be securing a future for the Jews — we’ll be saving the country from itself.

Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.