In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13 Elie (Eliezar) Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania. Along with his family, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 where he lost his mother and sister. Wiesel and his father were forced to march to Buchenwald, where his father died months before the camp was liberated. After the war, Wiesel lived in France and Israel before settling permanently in the United States. It was at this time that he wrote his autobiographical Night, which in many ways established the Holocaust as a formative event in the twentieth century. Wiesel is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University and founder of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust, which initiated the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1986 Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing to the world’s attention the importance of the Holocaust and for speaking out against violence, repression, and discrimination. On฀First฀Hearing฀the฀Holocaust฀Named I first encountered Elie Wiesel in 1971 in the classroom of Professor Richard Rubenstein. I arrived at my university in Florida the previous year and, for quite different reasons, so had Rubenstein. I went to Tallahassee for financial reasons and to get away from what I had known growing up. I needed to explore a new geographic and intellectual landscape. But moving from a Jewish neighborhood to the racially segregated Protestant enclave in Tallahassee in 1970 was like entering a different world. I Encountering the Holocaust Elie Wiesel 14฀฀฀•฀฀฀Encountering฀the฀Jewish฀Future Rubenstein arrived at Florida State having just published his groundbreaking and controversial book After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. This book gained notoriety, not all of it positive. Indeed, as After Auschwitz gained a wider readership, Rubenstein was on the run. Travelling from a Hillel appointment at a university in the Northeastern U.S. where Jews abounded, Rubenstein landed in Tallahassee, part of the deep South, where Jews were few in number.1 In Tallahassee, Rubenstein was far from the mainstream of American Jewish life. In those days the city center was dominated by established Protestant churches. As in most cities in the deep South, the color divide was noticeable. One of the first bus boycotts in the South was held in Tallahassee, and those in Black leadership positions had been coworkers of Martin Luther King Jr. Though the civil rights movement had moved Tallahassee toward integration, the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow were very much alive. Today there are thousands of Jews at the university, and Tallahassee is much more cosmopolitan. Back then there were less than a hundred Jews at the university, and probably not many more in the city itself. Yet the university was on the move, with one of the most interesting religious studies departments in the nation, one that had asked Rubenstein to join their faculty. During the years I studied with him, Rubenstein named the mass destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Nazi period as the Holocaust (or in Hebrew, Shoah). Though years had passed since the end of World War II, for the most part the Holocaust had remained unnamed. In my childhood, we knew that something terrible had happened to the Jews of Europe—I had Hebrew School teachers in the 1950s who had arrived in America only some years earlier— but could a catastrophe of such magnitude be named? World War II had claimed so many lives, and many of my friend’s fathers had served in the war. Having been part of the American occupying forces in Germany as the war came to a close, for the rest of his life my father harbored deep suspicions about Germany. As many Jews of his generation, he felt that Germany was prone to militarism and, when given the chance, would remilitarize and embark on still more wars of conquest. Yet even as we flipped through my father’s army scrapbook and listened to his commentary on where he had been and what he had done, the emphasis was on World War II—not on the particular suffering of Jews. Naming the Holocaust was just beginning to occur during my teenage years, and Rubenstein was on the cutting edge of that naming. It was during one of Rubenstein’s lectures that I heard the term Holocaust for the first time. At that moment a deep darkness surfaced within me. I was stunned and somehow...

Share