FOR RELEASE: Oct. 19, 1999
Contact: Linda Myers
Office: (607) 255-9735Home: (607) 277-5035
E-Mail: [email protected]
Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Elie Wiesel will speak in Bailey Hall on the Cornell University campus Nov. 4 at 8 p.m. Imprisoned in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald at age 15, Wiesel survived to write about the horrific experience in such books as Night. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986 for his efforts to rout human rights abuses around the world.
Tickets for Wiesel's talk can be purchased at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office now and are $10 for the general public.
Wiesel's vigorous defense of human rights and peace worldwide has also earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand Officer in the French Legion of Honor. He was appointed chair of the President's Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter and became founding chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Wiesel has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University since 1976 and a faculty member in both its religion and philosophy departments. He was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in the Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University (1982-83) and a distinguished professor of Judaic studies at the City University of New York (1972-76).
Wiesel's more than 40 books -- among them novels, plays, story and essays collections -- have won him numerous awards, including the Prix M*dicis for A Beggar in Jerusalem. The first volume of his autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published by Knopf in 1995. Knopf plans to publish the first English-language edition of the second volume, And the Sea Is Never Full, in late 1999 (that book was initially published in French in 1996 by Le Seuil).
Born in Romania, Wiesel has been an American citizen since 1963 and lives in New York City with his family. His campus visit is sponsored by the Cornell University Program Board. For ticket information, contact the Willard Straight Hall ticket office at (607) 255-3430.
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EDITORS: For media passes, contact Joseph Scaffido at (607) 255-4169.
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