August 8, 2010
Terry Teachout on Elie Wiesel
Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic, had some harsh words for Elie Wiesel in wake of Wiesel’s threat to sue a playwright who had written a play about an imagined relationship between the Holocaust survivor and Bernie Madoff.
Wiesel’s issued the threat after the playwright, Deborah Margolin, sent Wiesel a draft of her work, hoping he would like it.
Instead, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate sent Margolin a letter in April calling the play “obscene” and “defamatory,” according to The New York Times. He also said he might bring his lawyers into the matter if the play went forward the way it was written.
In the meantime, the production has moved from the Theater J at the Jewish Community Center in Washington to Stageworks/Hudson, a small theater company in Hudson, N.Y.
Also, Margonlin changed the script so that the Wiesel character goes by another name but bears an unmistakable resemblance to Wiesel.
Teachout, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, says no one likes to be publicly embarrassed — like Wiesel would have been in the original version of the play — but it’s not illegal. And that, Teachout writes, brings him to the heart of the matter:
Why on earth did Mr. Wiesel, of all people, threaten to drop the big one on Ms. Margolin and Theater J? Not only is he prominent and admired, but he is also a celebrated human-rights advocate who has famously declared that “indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.” Yet he has proved himself utterly indifferent to the rights of a serious artist and a well-regarded theater company to make art as they see fit, merely because their art portrays him in a way he doesn’t like. I wouldn’t go so far as to call that hypocritical—not quite—but I have no doubt that it’s unworthy of a great man who ought to know better.
Oh, for crying out loud. No one has the right to humiliate Elie Wiesel. He has been through enough, including being attacked in an elevator in San Francisco in 2007 by a Holocaust denier. http://is.gd/e9p1B There is plenty of other stuff to create a play about, but Deb Margolin seems to have decided to glomm onto Wiesel’s fame and misfortune for her own benefit. What an opportunist she is! Teachout is out of line and should consider that there are very few Holocaust survivors still alive and many of them are still suffering from the past. Talking about human rights? Do you think there is any coincidence that Theatre J is affiliated with J Street/NewfIsrael Fund, the faux-Jewish organization attempts to demonize and deligitimize a Jewish Israel?