Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence by Joseph Berger

Join us for an exclusive in-person talk with bestselling author Joseph Berger, as we discuss his new biography Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence. Your $35 admission ticket includes the author talk, audience Q&A, and an autographed hardcover copy of his new book. Berger is joined in conversation by Regina Gil, Executive Director of Gold Coast Arts.

As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage?

In Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence (May 23, Yale/Jewish Lives), Joseph Berger draws on Wiesel’s prodigious literary output and on interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics to answer this question. Berger explores Wiesel’s Hasidic childhood in Sighet, his postwar years spent rebuilding his life from the ashes in France, his transformation into a Parisian intellectual, his failed attempts at romance, his years scraping together a living in America as a journalist, his decision to marry and have a child, his emergence as a spokesperson for Holocaust survivors and persecuted peoples throughout the world, his lifelong devotion to the state of Israel, and his difficult final years. Through this penetrating portrait we come to know intimately the man the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee called “a messenger to mankind.”

About the Author
Joseph Berger was for thirty years a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor and continues to contribute periodically. He has taught urban affairs at the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College. His family memoir Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (2001) was chosen as a notable book of the year by the Times.

Advance Praise for Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence
“Joseph Berger has performed a small miracle in offering us this moving, meticulously researched, judicious, and learned biography of Elie Wiesel, who willed himself to transcend personal tragedy and bear witness in the hope that humanity might learn from the horrors of the past.”—David Nasaw, author of The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War.

Photo credit: Brenda Berger

Read the WSJ review of Berger-Elie Wiesel by Diane Cole in the Wall Street Journal.