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Steiner Lecture, 9/15: St. John’s College Presents “An Afternoon with Elie Wiesel”
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel will speak at St. John’s College at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 15, in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium. He will be delivering the annual Steiner Lecture.
Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, now part of Romania. He was 15 when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished; his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later sent to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945.
After the war, Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. His internationally acclaimed memoir of his time in the death camps, Night, has been translated into more than 30 languages.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Wiesel as Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice.
Since 1976, Wiesel has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, where he also holds the title of University Professor. Previously, he served as Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York and the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University. He has received more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.
He is the author of more than 40 works of fiction and nonfiction, including A Beggar in Jerusalem, The Testament, The Fifth Son, and two volumes of his memoirs.
For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, he won the Nobel Prize for Peace, and soon after, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
The lecture is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are required, but seating is limited. Public parking is available in the Gott and Hillman garages.