Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership (review)

While the immediate occasion and relevance for this complicated and provocative book could be found in the American media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflicts of especially the past thirty years, Mark Chmiel’s real critical touchstone here is a meeting between two men nearly fifty years ago. One man is Francois Mauriac, the Catholic novelist with the ear of the French Prime Minister. The other man is Elie Wiesel, struggling young journalist, trying to gain access to the same leader. This now legendary meeting (well documented by Wiesel himself) in which Wiesel, confronted by Mauriac’s devout Christianity, indignantly and passionately recalls what happened to his people under the Nazis a mere ten years before, and abruptly leaves the meeting. Mauriac, surprised, follows and of course solicits Wiesel’s story—the story which later became Night—the work that established Wiesel as perhaps the emblematic survivor of the Jewish Holocaust.

Now substitute Mauriac with Chmiel, a Catholic professor of theology at St. Louis University, involved in grassroots political activism which openly confronts the often contradictory, nearly always problematic U.S. foreign policy. Chmiel engages Wiesel’s work here, not through a literary analysis or a critical meditation on his Holocaust memoirs, but rather through a sustained analysis of Wiesel’s dual mission of responsible Holocaust remembrance on the one hand and active global, sociopolitical engagement on the other. Using Herman and Chomsky’s paired expression of “worthy and unworthy” victims, Chmiel’s thematic base is the process by which Elie Wiesel and the Jewish victims of the Holocaust went from being “unworthy victims” (that is, a people who have suffered even indirectly from the policies of the United States or its allies) to being “worthy victims” in the United States by the late 1970s. After a brief biographical section, Chmiel offers an astute analysis of Wiesel’s tenuous, but generally well- received position in global affairs and his discourse and practice in the context of “worthy and unworthy victims.”

Beginning with Wiesel’s conversations with Mauriac, to his engagement with the plight of Russian Jews in the late 1960s, to his role as conscious humanist for the Reagan administration, and up to his complicated involvement with early twenty-first century Israel, Chmiel incisively and evenhandedly interprets Wiesel’s consistent invocation of his own status as a Jewish witness and subsequent storyteller to raise some difficult questions about the state of Israel. Using passages from Wiesel’s own ever- developing autobiographical writings (in particular, from the mid-sixties on), speech excerpts, and segments from his own single brief personal meeting with Wiesel, Chmiel observes Wiesel’s response to a number of sociopolitical and historical issues, including the third Arab-Israeli War (1967) and his now famous response to Charles DeGualle’s stance toward Israel, his interventions on behalf of suffering refugees in Southeast Asia, his very public and highly eloquent speeches on the starving children of Biafra, his work with the suffering Miskito Indians in Nicaraguara and on until his involvement with the Clinton administration and the Kosovo conflict.

Explicit in Chmiel’s set of arguments is an admiration for Wiesel the activist and diplomat who calls for civic responsibility, awareness and intervention on behalf of victims all across the world. Yet he also notes Wiesel’s consistent use of the Holocaust as “the measuring stick” for suffering in the twentieth century. Interestingly and at times uncomfortably, Chmiel observes on the one hand Wiesel’s reiteration of anguish, how he often raises difficult, and sometimes mystical, emotion-laden questions of why no one does anything for victims of trauma, in effect why the world continues to remain silent as it did during the Holocaust. On the other hand, Chmiel is frustrated by Wiesel’s lack of any specific formulation about or assessment of the U.S. government’s ongoing agency and complicity in human rights violations around the world (the Salvadorans, Vietnamese, East Timorese, and Ache Indians are some of the specific populations discussed). In...