In 1999, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel delivered a 21-minute speech at the White House entitled “The Perils of Indifference” (you can watch it here.) Wiesel’s main point can be summed up by a famous quote of his from another context: “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” Wiesel explores apathy and indifference in the context of several domains of relationship: Man and his own self, Man and Others, Man and the Community, Man and God. Wiesel grounds his reflections in the hard-earned wisdom of his own Holocaust experiences. This seminar will carefully read and study Wiesel’s speech, mining it for the enduring wisdom it can offer our own age, an age marked by both frenzied activism and confused indifference.
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