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4.2.12
WC: 191694

Being mentored by Elie Wiesel

Since the beginning of my career, Elie Wiesel—the world’s most famous and influential Holocaust
survivor—has served as a guide, mentor and friend. I have sought his advice on many issues, and
he has sought mine.

As a professor of public law, I get to nominate candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1986, I
nominated him. In my letter of nomination, I wrote the following:

No one in the world today deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than Elie Wiesel.
Professor Wiesel represents the survivors of the most massive genocide ever perpetrated
on a segment of humankind—with the implicit approval of so many bystanders. It is
particularly disappointing that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee—which, because of its
North European heritage, in some sense represents a portion of these bystanders—has
never seen fit to recognize Professor Wiesel’s contribution to peace.

To understand Professor Wiesel’s unique and immeasurable contribution to peace, one
must only imagine how it might have been without a Wiesel. It is impossible to imagine
the rage that must be continually experienced by direct and indirect survivors of the
Holocaust. Other victims have responded by non-peaceful means—for example, the
continuing violence of some Armenians against Turks. Jewish survivors have not. There
has been no terrorism against innocent Germans—or even guilty Germans who live in
luxury and sometimes in honor. For this alone, the Jewish survivors as a group deserve
recognition for their contribution to peace.

Professor Wiesel’s role in helping to shape the attitude of the first and second generations
of survivors is, of course, widely acknowledged.

There are many excellent reasons for recognizing Professor Wiesel. But none is more
important than for his role in teaching survivors and their children how to respond in
constructive peace and justice to a worldwide conspiracy of genocide, whose complicitous
components included mass killing, mass silence, and mass indifference. Professor Wiesel
has devoted his life to teaching the survivors of a conspiracy which excluded so few, to
reenter and adjust in peace to an alien world that deserved little forgiveness. He has also
taught the rest of the world the injustice of silence in the face of genocide. Wiesel’s life
work merits the highest degree of recognition—especially from representatives of the
world that stood silently by.

In an article several years later, I urged the Nobel committee to use Elie Wiesel as its model for
selecting future Nobel Prize winners. This is part of what I wrote:

Many of the Nobel Peace Prize winners were recognized by the Nobel Committee
for their work on behalf of their own people: Most recent winners - Rigoberto
Menchu of Guatemala, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Bishop
Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Lech Walesa of Poland - were honored primarily for

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