The Golden Tribe Lecture Series, a collaborative effort of Student Government Association and Union Productions, is proud to present An Evening with Elie Wiesel on Tuesday, October 4 in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall.
Tickets will be distributed only to FSU students with valid gold FSU ID from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. Students may obtain only one ticket per valid gold FSU ID. Tickets are first come, first serve and will be reserved seating. Upon availability, remaining tickets will be distributed to both students and non-students after 6:30pm
Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, (Hungary 1940-45). He was fifteen when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished there. He and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in 1945. After the war, Wiesel studied in Paris and eventually became a journalist in that city, yet he remained silent about his time in the death camps. During an interview with the French writer François Mauriac, he was persuaded to end that silence and wrote his memoir Night. Since its publication in 1956 in Yiddish and in 1958 in French, Night has been translated into over thirty languages and millions of copies have been sold.
An American citizen since 1963, Wiesel’s work has earned him many awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is the recipient of more than one hundred and twenty honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning in the United States, Europe and Israel. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which created the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.Wiesel’s more than fifty books have won numerous awards, including the Prix Médicis for A Beggar in Jerusalem, the Prix Livre Inter for The Testament and the Grand Prize for Literature from the City of Paris for The Fifth Son.
An ardent supporter of Israel, Wiesel was also among the first to defend the causes of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Argentina’s “Disappeared,” Cambodia’s refugees, the Kurds, South African apartheid victims, famine victims in Africa, the prisoners in the former Yugoslavia and most recently the victims of genocide in Darfur. Soon after he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel and his wife Marion established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Its mission, rooted in the memory of the Holocaust, is to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality. The Foundation runs multiple programs both domestically and internationally.
In the U.S. and abroad, the Foundation organizes international conferences for youth in conflict-ridden countries and sponsors its Nobel Initiative Conferences. These conferences, which focus on themes of Peace, Education, Health, the Environment and Terrorism, serve as a way to bring together Nobel Laureates and world leaders to discuss social problems and develop suggestions for change. For four years beginning in 2005, the Foundation co-hosted the Petra Conferences with His Majesty King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
“An Evening with Elie Wiesel,” is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Visit http://goldentribe.fsu.edu/ for ticket information on this and other upcoming lectures.
