[MUSIC PLAYING] HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome you to a special 70th anniversary recording of this series at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

I'm honored to welcome our guest today, Elijah Wiesel, a Yale undergraduate, an author, a columnist, and grandson of Elie Wiesel, the most frequent guest of this series.

Elijah, a pleasure to meet you today.

ELIJAH WIESEL, The Open Mind: Pleasure to meet you as well.

It really is an honor to host you on this series because of our granddad's respective exchanges.

I think dozens of conversations that were filmed, some were not filmed.

The generational connection means a lot, and I know it would mean a lot to my granddad.

So thank you for being here again.

- Thank you.

- Let me ask you about your memory of your granddad to begin with, Eli Wiesel.

How do you think about him, and what is your most poignant memory with him?

My most poignant memory with him when he was still alive was, I remember we would both used to wake up very early, and he would make me English muffins while I sat in the kitchen.

He would make English muffins, he would toast them and then put cream cheese and blueberry jam on top, and we would eat them together in the morning before anyone else in the family woke up.

When did you recognize the kind of historical memory and legacy that your granddad represented?

I recognized that the full, I would say, historical significance of my grandfather on the day he died.

That was when I read Knight for the first time.

I was 10 years old, and I think it was either the day of or the day after that I sat down on the couch and read it in one sitting fully through.

That was when I fully under, maybe not fully understood like everything, but to the point that a 10-year-old could, I understood like, oh, he's a, he was a historical figure.

So I understood that the day he died.

But leading up to that in maybe the last year of his life, I started to understand more about the Holocaust itself.

And I started to understand that people knew him or knew of him because of his work surrounding the Holocaust.

But I didn't fully understand what his work was.

I just knew what the Holocaust was, and I knew that he was talking about it a lot.

If you had the full maturity that you do now as an adult, since he's passed, how would you approach engaging with him?

If I had the maturity of a 20-year-old, which I am now, and I was able to talk to him then, I would probably ask him about, for honestly advice at this point, I would ask him for where he stands on what he thinks I should do regarding campus antisemitism or what he thinks should be done with regards to Israel and the Middle Eastern politics.

He had such a grounding moral voice and standing that even now I try to look towards when I think about campus antisemitism and Middle Eastern politics.

But at the same time, I think it would have caused him great pain to see the state of anti-Semitism in the United States today, especially on college campuses, and to know that I am going through that.

While my grandfather was not alive to see any of this, my grandmother, Ellie's wife, Marion, was alive on October 7th and passed away about exactly a year ago.

While I wish I could have talked to my grandfather about all of this with the maturity I have now that I didn't have when I was 10, I was able to talk to her about it.

In the last six months, year of her life, I would visit her very frequently from New Haven.

And we would just talk about all that, 'cause I felt comfortable talking to her, and she had a lot to say, and she was a very comforting presence for that.

- Is the myopic disposition of some in Gen Z, their failure to understand the terrorist attack that America experienced on 9/11, does it start there because people who were critical of Israel's response to the terrorist attack don't have an appreciation of the most seismic event that America experienced of that same kind of terrorism?

So there are two things I'm going to say about that.

At first I wasn't sure whether or not to compare October 7th and 9/11, but looking back I would say in terms of historical significance, in terms of geopolitical significance, and in terms of emotional significance for a nation, October 7th is comparable to 9/11.

And the second thing I want to say is that I believe that my current class at Yale, class of '28, they were born in like 2005, 2006, I'm 2005, and the seniors now are 2003, 2004, none of them are alive for 9/11, and I don't think that's the only reason that they have such an insensitivity towards terrorist attacks.

Well, especially when they happen to Jews, because that's another reason, but I can talk on that later.

It's one of many reasons.

I don't think it's one answer to that question.

Right.

So how has the reaction that you witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack compared to what you've experienced the last two years, you're going to be a rising junior?

When I was still in high school in my senior year, the reaction I had then was, for a while I was depressed, but then I lost a lot of friends who were once very close to me.

And I used that as a filter, because I started thinking, yes, it's good to have friends with differing opinions, but at some point, if what they are saying has such a negative effect on my own mental health, then I can use this as a filter to filter out the people who are worth having as friends for my emotional wellbeing and for my future.

When I got to college, I had been slightly traumatized by that whole like, losing a lot of friends.

So I became very careful of who I talked to and who I made friends with.

That probably hurt me in the short run.

I don't know about the long run, but in the short run it definitely limited opportunities for me.

I had a lot of walls that I had put up because I didn't want to make friends with someone who I would anticipate would betray me.

I'm trying to let those walls down now, but that was a very important aspect of my reaction.

Where have you been able to draw the line now with people whose words or actions you find dehumanizing and the prospect that people who are either anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic can transcend that and that you can be part of the solution of basically empowering people to see beyond anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism.

So where do I draw the line?

I have a very clear boundary and the boundary doesn't even lie at someone saying free Palestine.

I know what I think about that, but that's not where the boundary is.

The boundary for me is very clearly at globalized the Intifada or any sort of lionization of the Intifada.

On Yale's campus two days ago at the time of recording, there was graffiti written in artificial blood in the snow in the center of campus and in the freshmen courtyard, old campus and cross campus.

Messages were written in fake blood that said, some of them were like, "Gaza dies, Yale profits," and "Free Palestine," the usual stuff.

But then there were some that said, "IDF die," and "Globalized," and "intifada."

It didn't say "globalized," it just said "intifada."

And those two, "IDF die" and "intifada," that's where I draw the line.

Because when someone is calling for an intifada, that is no longer a political opinion.

It is a threat of violence and terrorism against Jews and Israelis, myself included.

So I take that as a threat to my personal safety, campus safety, and national security.

It also is quite logical, Elijah, because "free Palestine" or a message that is, if you will, more constructive towards a mission or message of agency, empowerment, whereas the other two messages are threats, violence, like the intimation of violence.

So you see it differently if someone wants to assert that they feel like Palestinians are shackled in some respect economically or their liberties, their civil liberties, that the pursuit of that freedom is not something to which you take offense.

In my grandfather's Nobel Prize speech, acceptance speech, he said, I'm going to paraphrase this, he said something along the lines of, "I am sensitive to the Palestinian cause, but I abhor their methods of violence."

And I think that's a fair assessment.

I don't know how it aged as a different story and what my own political opinions on that are, but I think that's a fair assessment.

The Palestinians, if they want to live in civil security, economic security, they stop trying to attack Israel for a second.

We can ease security in the long run.

We can work towards better relations with them.

And then the political solutions can work themselves out, one state, two states, some sort of accords.

I don't know what the exact specifics of it would be, but only then can there be actually a solution.

In the Times of Israel, Elijah, you wrote about the death of campus dialogue.

Here's the key point I think you make in this essay, that the stance of being an unapologetic Zionist invites, in your words, automatic vitriol.

And it is emblematic of a wider issue that there is a growing number in the academic community who preach liberal values while practicing the opposite.

So I think what you're intimating about campus dialogue is that the suggestion of someone being a Zionist in the room is triggering to people.

I saw this for—it elicited such a negative reaction that I didn't even know what to think.

Do I laugh?

Do I gasp?

What do I do?

Because in this op-ed I say that it was when Ehud Olmert and Nasr al-Kidwa came to speak at the Yale Political Union.

But I stood up, I said, "Hi, my name is Elijah Wiesel."

And then before I asked my question, because the question isn't even relevant, and I met instantly with hisses and booing.

The YPO has a tradition that if someone says something you agree with, you tap your feet, you go.

And then if someone says something you disagree with, you hiss, you boo.

My name was enough to elicit that reaction.

How pervasive is antisemitism on Yale's campus?

Last year, very pervasive.

The year before, but when I wasn't there, from what I understand, much more pervasive.

This year, it's calmed down a lot.

I think the people who wrote in the graffiti were trying to restart something.

They wanted to stir the pot again.

And I'm gonna say, thankfully, that wasn't our side trying to stir the pot.

It was their side.

- And when you say that the pervasiveness is present, right, but it's declined, you're saying now in 2026, it's chilled a little bit or cooled.

At least for now.

Right, but when you say that, first of all, let me ask you this.

Do you differentiate between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism?

I do, but I believe that it's a Venn diagram and the overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is so vast that the majority of it is in that overlap.

I believe that it is possible to a) be anti-Semitic without being anti-Zionist and b) that as much as it hurts me to say, because I don't like saying this, but I think it is true, is that you can be somewhat anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic, but I think those are very rare exceptions.

Even those exceptions are based in or have some attribution to anti-Semitic dialogue, even if they don't realize it.

I think when that happens, the only way it can't be anti-Semitic, or most of the ways it can't be anti-Semitic, is if the person saying it just straight up doesn't realize it.

Right.

And I think that often in this conversation, it's important to just provide that historical context of one religious state, country, versus many others that are run by a religious authority in effect where there is a practice of theology, whether that's Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other countries.

And I just think that that particular context gets missed in some of the discussions.

Yeah.

And I want to add on to the anti-Zionism versus anti-Semitism question.

Anti-Semitism is a multi-millennia-year-old virus that evolves based on the society that it's in and can take hold in.

The Jew evolves into whatever a society hates most.

That's how it is viewed.

And right now, the past 20 years of political dialogue in the U.S.

and honestly, I might say I agree with, is anti-colonial, is anti-prejudice, is very based on rectifying racial tension in the United States that goes back for the past decades.

But in doing that, society created something that it hates.

It hates what is perceived to be a colonial identity.

It hates anything that doesn't fit into these narratives that they've created.

And Jews, we don't fit into that narrative that this dialogue has created.

And they view us as a colonial enterprise.

And they view us as what our current society hates most.

So what is most instrumental in combating the bigotry that you see manifested on campus?

I mean, how do you feel that what you describe as Gen Z, which is infected with a great amount of anti-Semitism, how can it be most effectively confronted?

I believe that as of right now, it is not worth trying to change the mind of anyone screaming "globalize the intifada."

I'll tell a story.

April 2025, there was an attempted encampment in Beinecke Plaza at Yale.

And I went in, stuff happened, but the stuff that happened during, while I was in there is not what's important.

What's important was what happened as I was leaving.

I saw a friend of mine.

We weren't really close friends, but like I knew him, I'd talked to him before.

I was like, "Hey man, what are you doing here?"

And he's like, "I don't know.

"I felt a little pressured to come here because all my friends are here and they're protesting and it seems to be for a good cause.

I just feel pressured to come.

I don't know why I'm actually here.

And I told him, "Don't get yourself involved in this.

It's not worth it.

If you don't know why you're here, just stay out of it."

Things like that leave an impression.

They plant the seeds of doubt in social pressure and ideology.

I think you provided a really helpful starting template here of how you confront the resurgence of anti-Semitism.

So you said basically, why?

That's the question.

Why are you here?

Why are you doing this?

Let's try to push even beyond that.

Are there any tactics that you have found effective beyond the question of why?

So I'm not going to lie.

I don't have a definitive answer for that.

I've been grappling with that question for a year and a half ever since I got to Yale.

But I had an interesting conversation last night actually over dinner with a friend of mine.

And he was saying that anti-Semitism is a disease and he likened it to dementia or Alzheimer's.

And he said that instead of attacking the patient, you should attack the disease.

I don't know if that's the right comparison or analogy, but it has provoked a lot of thought in me.

- Of that constituency, I mean, first, how would you describe the volume of that constituency in your class, the class of 2028, right?

- Yes.

- You'd say more than 50% are some degree of anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist.

What, if you were to attribute some sort of calculus to it, what would you say?

- 35, 40%.

- So it's not as large as that.

- I would say since it's calmed down, it used to be 50%.

It's calmed down a bit, so people don't care as much anymore.

It's not as much in the news cycle.

- The former vice presidential nominee, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, invoked Anne Frank in concern about the ICE-involved murders of innocent American civilians.

And I'm talking about Alex Pretty and Rene Good.

Yes.

He did not analogize their killings to the Holocaust explicitly, but he suggested that we were on the precipice of people reading about this like they would read about the Nazis' atrocities in Anne Frank's diaries.

It elicited, to your earlier suggestion, a rather stark response from the National Holocaust Museum in DC and I think the board that governs it to say, "Don't do that."

I want to get your perspective on whether you see the deportation campaign, not just the murders of Good and Pretti, but the idea of dehumanizing people, in effect excommunicating them from society because they are not legitimate citizens.

They don't have a birth certificate.

They don't have proper documentation.

They don't have documentation, but they're still human beings.

And whether or not... You at all have a different perspective than the Holocaust Museum in that you understand what Governor Walz was getting at.

So, I'm going to tackle this kind of from two angles.

First angle is what do I think about the comparisons to ICE and the Nazis?

And two is what I think about ICE itself.

My first point is let the poor girl rest.

And Frank and the Holocaust are not a yardstick for the population of America or any population to measure atrocity.

Atrocities and tragedies in the world can be measured on their own without the Holocaust as a reference in order for them to still merit concern, action, and sympathy.

Number two, I understand what Governor Walz was getting at.

My grandfather was, for a while, an undocumented immigrant in the United States.

He was in a full body cast after getting hit by a taxi.

He was, and he missed his visa renewal appointment, because he was on a journalism visa from France.

And he went to the immigration office after he recovered, and they offered him, they said, you know, you can apply for US citizenship.

So I think deporting immigrants who have come here in search of the American dream is immoral, based on my own familial experience, and also the manner in which ICE is doing it is incredibly brutal and unnecessary.

And you're saying that, let that be analyzed in and of itself.

And yes, let that be analyzed in and of itself.

Right, and I hear what you're saying.

And Walz's suggestion was that we, the American people, are being witness to the emerging atrocities.

And I think you're making a cogent and compelling point about not jumping the gun on any kind of historical analogy.

Not everything is the Holocaust or should be compared to the Holocaust.

However, I was talking to a very good friend of mine.

We had a conversation about this, and one that left me quite troubled, and I still don't know how to feel about it.

But she was making those same comparisons, and she was telling me that ICE is operating like a private military for Trump, that is operating outside of the law, and having very little disregard for actual anything, like civilian presence.

You don't need an entire army with military-grade weapons to go in front of a house or to drag people out of their cars or to drag kids out of school.

She made a comparison that ICE operates in a similar manner to the Gestapo.

And probably objectively, I don't know whether I want to say that that's true.

I hope it's not true because I have spent the past two years getting told that my people's efforts to rescue our hostages and maintain our security are a genocide.

I've spent the past two years hearing that.

Even before Israel entered Gaza in October 2023, they were screaming genocide before the military operations started.

They were screaming genocide on October 7th.

I am very averse to anyone telling me that something right now is a holocaust, especially if it, if a lot of them are the same people.

I'm not including my friend in this, but a lot of people who are right now very anti-ICE, which I respect.

I respect that.

It's a very American thing to do.

A lot of them are also the people screaming "Free Palestine, globalize the Intifada."

And to align myself with that, it's a very difficult thing for me to do.

But at the same time, I support the message of anti-ICE.

Like, I don't think what ICE is doing, A, isn't working, two, is unnecessary, and three, brutal.

And so with respect to ICE, I mean, time will tell, right?

I mean, the Department of Homeland Security has now bought large detention facilities in a number of cities, I think.

I think that's a red alarm.

Yeah.

That's a red alarm.

I'm hesitant and I'm not going to compare it to Auschwitz because I don't think it's accurate.

We're nowhere near there.

It's not like a concentration camp.

It's not like a ghetto.

It's its own thing.

It stands alone.

I don't like it.

It raises alarm bells for me.

I think there's concern now that this November's elections are going to be plagued by an attempt of the current administration to control the vote and the outcome of the vote that way.

I mean, if we were to see mass deployment of ICE at the polls... That's a red flag.

That would alarm me to a very great degree.

If people genuinely care about humanity, I think they have to relinquish some of their slogans.

Yeah.

Just get rid of all the slogans.

One of the things that I've noticed-- and I have more experience with this from the Zionist perspective.

But from what I've noticed, and actually from speaking to the Free Palestine crowd in person, I've had dinners with some of them just to try to understand them, see if there's any bridge to gap.

I've come to a conclusion that there is a lot more diversity of thought amongst Zionists than against anti-Zionists.

Anti-Zionism is a very clear cut, you're either with us fully or you're against us.

You can't, like if you're starting to say, "Oh, maybe I condemn October 7th," you get rejected.

You're not resisting enough.

You're brainwashed by Zionist propaganda.

That's that.

But amongst Zionists, there's still two-state versus one-state solution discussion.

There's discussion of what should happen after Gaza, was the war in Gaza justified?

Should we, earlier, during the hostage crisis while it was still going on, it was, should we prioritize the return of the hostages or the security of Israel and not give in to releasing hundreds of terrorists?

There's a lot of diversity of thought.

What's your vision for the future of Gaza now?

There will be no permanent fix for Gaza.

There won't be any permanent lasting peace unless Hamas actually disarms.

And they're not agreeing to do it, even though they said they would.

They're just going to rebuild, attack Israel again, and then there's going to be another war.

More people are going to die.

But in the case of Al-Qaeda, why was the U.S.

able to end Al-Qaeda and Israel is not able to end Hamas?

Because Israel did not have international support, and we were, and I say we at this point, Israel were held back.

There was an incident where the Biden administration refused to send weapons, refused to allow the IDF to operate in Rafah.

That delay cost Israeli lives.

It cost Israeli logistics.

It cost Israeli intelligence.

Israel has given up the element of surprise because it drops leaflets on civilian areas to warn the civilian population to evacuate because Israel is held to a much higher standard of war.

It just prompts me to wonder, when people make the point, are Hamas and the Palestinian people synonymous?

No.

They're not.

The impression that I get of kind of the unending supply of Hamas warriors, what was Israel's operation for, right?

I mean, it was, if they can't end Hamas, then that's not mission accomplished for them, right?

If there's four terrorists and you kill two of them, how many terrorists do you have left?

You have four, because the two terrorists' brothers are going to be recruited into Hamas to avenge their brother.

So is there a way to address the problem with this, that's not like sort of this never-ending, lethal snake that just kind of repopulates?

So thank you for using the word "snake," because yes, destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Destroy their government.

Destroy the regime, because that's the snake's head.

All the money trickles down from the Islamic Republic into Hezbollah, into Hamas, into the Houthis, into Iraqi-backed militias, formerly to the Assad regime.

For people who you perceive as complacent, whether it's at Yale or in society in general, who just don't care.

What do you say to them?

If you are my friend and you are complacent, know that globalize the Intifada is a call for my death.

Holocaust denial and trivialization is an insult to my family's history and an insult to the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

And know that it is very personal for me.

Elijah Wiesel, an honor to meet you today and to host you on The Open Mind for our 70th anniversary.

It's an honor to be here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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