Joseph Berger’s book Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence is an intimate look at famed thinker and writer Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), author of the seminal Holocaust memoir Night and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The book is based on Wiesel’s prodigious literary catalog and interviews with family, friends, scholars, and critics. In it, Berger seeks to explore how an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz compelled the world to confront the Holocaust.
Berger is joined in conversation by Thane Rosenbaum, a writer and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University. They will discuss Wiesel’s life and how he became, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him, “a messenger to mankind.” A book signing will follow.
The book Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, published by Jewish Lives, the prizewinning series of biographies in partnership with Yale University Press, will be available to purchase.
Joseph Berger was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for over 30 years, writing about education, religion, and the colorful kaleidoscope that is New York City, as well chronicling many of the events that have shaken Israel and the Middle East. For the previous 14 years, he was a reporter for the New York Post and Newsday. Berger contributes periodic articles for The Times and teaches urban affairs courses at the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College.
Berger is the author of six books, including Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust, a memoir about his family’s experience as refugees in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, The Pious Ones; The World of Hasidim and their Battles with America, and The World in a City: Traveling the Globe through the Neighborhoods of the New New York, an intimate insider’s tour of a New York City transformed by immigration and gentrification. Displaced Persons was chosen as a notable book of the year 2001 by The Times, which called it “an extraordinary memoir.”
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor, and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including a post-Holocaust trilogy, and the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, Elijah Visible, and mostly recently Saving Free Speech…from Itself. Rosenbaum is the Legal Analyst for CBS News Radio, a Columnist for the Jewish Journal, for which he received the Louis Rapoport Award for Excellence in Commentary, a Contributor to the White Rose Magazine, a Senior Political Analyst for the Jewish TV Channel. He is the creative director of the Forum on Life, Culture & Society, has written essays and reviews for major news publications, and appears often on cable news channels.
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