More in ‘Elie Wiesel’

Today in Tablet Magazine, staff writer Marissa Brostoff raves over Imagining Madoff, the controversial play that once featured Elie Wiesel as a character, which is playing upstate. The Scroll needs to get to the theater more often.

Earlier this year, playwright Deborah Margolin sent Elie Wiesel the original version of a script fictionalizing Wiesel’s real-life betrayal by Bernie Madoff; the renowned author wrote back threatening to take legal action against its production. The play, he wrote, was “defamatory” and “obscene.” Margolin’s revised version of Imagining Madoff, which opened last week in upstate ...

Though it has long played a central role in the popular history of the Holocaust, survivor testimony has for decades been seen as marginal by Holocaust historians. The issue has preoccupied scholars since Raul Hilberg’s landmark 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews, in which he largely discounted the “usefulness” of survivor accounts.
Hilberg’s pioneering ...

• Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number-two man, blames Arab leaders for “surrendering” to Israel in a new tape. [Haaretz]
• What exactly are the U.N. soldiers in southern Lebanon supposed to do? No one is actually sure, and Hezbollah is exploiting the confusion. [LAT]
• Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system is ready and will be deployed ...

Setting up a stall amid the weekly throng of Israeli demonstrators, a line of enterprising young Palestinians sell hot coffee and fresh-pressed juice to the thirsty crowds in the long afternoon heat. They add to what has become a vibrant weekly event with a samba band and clowns captivating young children—and sometimes older demonstrators, too. ...

The always excellent Washington City Paper has a big feature all about Theater J’s cancellation, at Elie Wiesel’s request, of the world premiere of Imagining Madoff, a play that featured a fictional jailhouse meeting between Bernard Madoff and Wiesel.
The central irony is that the head of the theater (which is funded by the Washington, ...

There was a to-do in last week when Theater J, the Washington, D.C., JCC’s theater company, canceled what was to have been the world premiere of a play about Bernard Madoff. They canned it, specifically, after Elie Wiesel complained about its depiction of a fictional jailhouse scene between him and the notorious Ponzi schemer. (Wiesel ...

• The world premiere of a play that imagines a jail-cell meeting (which never happened) between Bernard Madoff and Elie Wiesel was canceled after Wiesel protested. [WP]
• A planned Ashkelon, Israel, hospital is not to be built on a onetime Jewish cemetery, as angry ultra-Orthodox alleged. Turns out, the ancient cemetery was pagan! Build away! ...

• Palestinian leadership warned that a West Bank mosque fire yesterday could threaten the planned proximity talks. Many Palestinians believe Israeli settlers lit the flame; Israeli authorities are not yet convinced the cause was arson. [NYT]
• Before departing New York, President Ahmadinejad pledged that new sanctions wouldn’t halt Iran’s nuclear development—though they will, he added, ...

• President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu talk about the talks. [JPost]
• Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mubarak talk about the talks. Oh, and everyone is lowering expectations. [NYT]
• Tacit U.S. acceptance of Israeli nuclear weapons despite the Mideast’s ostensibly being a nuke-free zone has made it more difficult to fight Iranian and also Egyptian proliferation. ...