Oprah Winfrey has selected Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as her latest book club pick, catapulting the famous book on the Holocaust onto the bestseller list over a half-century after it was first published.
“Night” was required reading in high school French class (though I seem to remember most of us cheating by picking up the English translation from the library). It’s a powerful book and Wiesel emerged as one of the key voices of conscience on the Holocaust. There was a time when Wiesel’s word would have carried more weight than Oprah’s.
Then again, with Holocaust-denial on the rise (from the usual suspects and the Left and the Arab world), and with the generation of survivors slowly disappearing, perhaps this was the right time to push the book back into the spotlight.