Elie Wiesel and Obama Will Co-Author Book
Book of Friends: Elie Wiesel hugs President Barack Obama before speech at Holocaust Museum in Washington. Image by getty images
Elie Wiesel and President Obama are writing a book together, the Holocaust survivor and author told an Israeli newspaper.
Book of Friends: Elie Wiesel hugs President Barack Obama before speech at Holocaust Museum in Washington. Image by getty images
The book, which the two men will resume writing after Tuesday’s presidential election, is “a book of two friends,” Wiesel, a Nobel laureate, told Haaretz.
Haaretz reported that Wiesel and Obama became friends in 2009 when Wiesel joined Obama on a visit to the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Wiesel was interned at the end of World War II following a death march from Auschwitz.
“We talk about philosophy, contemplation, thought, but never about politics. He is a thinking person, a person with depth and intellectual curiosity,” Wiesel said about the dinners that the two occasionally have together.
Wiesel and Obama first met when Wiesel lectured at California’s Occidental College, where Obama was a student.
“Your lecture has stayed with me to this day,” the president told Wiesel years later, Wiesel told Haaretz. “When I heard that, my pulse went up. I told myself that I have to be careful because I can never know whether anyone in the audience will be a future president.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
