A prolific writer and speaker, Wiesel appeals to a wide audience of young Jews who, in the 1960s, felt cut off from their traditions and their ancestors' struggles. The receipts from his lectures he gives to a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish school; his book royalties he donates to a fund for a synagogue to honor his father, whose death so near liberation continues to haunt Wiesel. He supports Holocaust survivors, lectures, publishes, and comments on the subjects of world indifference to suffering, Cambodian refugees, the Vietnamese "boat people," the "disappeared" of Argentina, Arab refugees in Palestine, and nuclear proliferation. He attended the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 and the Jewish liberation of Jerusalem, filmed a visit to Sighet for NBC twenty years after his deportation, and in 1965 risked arrest in a Moscow airport while visiting Russian Jewish "refuseniks." He sympathized with Martin Luther King's civil rights efforts, rebuked former President Reagan in 1985 for honoring the Bitburg Cemetery for SS corpsmen, and bolsters humanitarian efforts in Biafra, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia. In 1987, he testified about his experiences at Auschwitz during the trial of war criminal Klaus Barbie in Lyons, France.
A classroom influence for human rights, Wiesel, formerly Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at Manhattan's City College of New York, has served Yale and Florida International universities as a visiting scholar. He has remained at Boston University since 1976 as the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities. Named chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council by President Jimmy Carter, Wiesel is often called upon as a consultant and receives continual publicity and acclaim for his insistent illumination of the Holocaust, which be considers a holy event, and his denunciation of the bystanders who witnessed the loading of cattle cars and made no outcry. His honors include the American Liberties Medallion, Prix Médicis, Prix Rivarol, Prix de l'Universalité, Joseph Prize for Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. Medallion, Raoul Wallenberg Medal, and, in 1985, the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement. His honorary degrees derive from a broad span of colleges and universities: Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union, Manhattanville, Yeshiva, Boston, Spertus College of Judaica, Wesleyan, Notre Dame, Anna Maria, Brandeis, Bar-Ilan, Hofstra, Talmudic, Marquette, Simmons, St. Scholastica, Tufts, Moravian, Loyola, Emory, and Yale. On December 10, 1986, his sister Hilda attended the Nobel ceremonies at the University of Oslo, Norway, and heard her brother's acceptance of the Peace Prize, an award to a beloved freedom fighter which carried a stipend of $287,769.78 along with the admiration of the civilized world. In 1995, he wrote again of his family's catastrophe and cited events leading up to his marriage in All Rivers Run to the Sea, the first volume of a two-part autobiography.
