Humanitarian and Night author Elie Wiesel lectures on the theme "What Makes Us Moral: An Abrahamic Perspective."
Wiesel draws on his experience as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps as well as contemporary global issues for evidence of what makes a moral or immoral society.
Bio
Tom Becker
Tom Becker is the president of Chautauqua Institution. Becker joined Chautauqua in March 1985 as a vice president of the Institution and vice president of the Chautauqua Foundation. Over the years he was promoted to executive vice president and CEO of the Foundation.
In 2001, he continued as chief executive officer of the Foundation and was named executive vice president of Chautauqua Institution. As chief executive, Becker oversaw the growth of the Foundation into a professional fund-raising organization and led it to raising over $100 million in support of the Institution.
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945.
After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps. The result was his internationally acclaimed memoir, La Nuit or Night, which has since been translated into more than thirty languages.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Elie Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.
(born Sept. 30, 1928, Sighet, Rom.) Romanian-born U.S. novelist. Living in a small Hasidic community, Wiesel and his family were deported in 1944 to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald; his parents and sister were killed. All his works reflect his experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust and his attempt to resolve the ethical torment of why it happened and what it reveals about human nature. They include Night (1958), A Beggar in Jerusalem (1968), The Testament (1980), and The Forgotten (1989). A noted lecturer, he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace for his universal condemnation of violence, hatred, and oppression.
I am not Mr. Wiesel's speaker or defender. However, if I will try to find the logic behind this statement, which is not easy, I would think that his argument stems from the fact that the U.S. war against the Germans was just becuase it was a war to end a war and everything that came with it.
This brings up the question of who gets to decide what war is just? I do not have the answer and I don't know if he does as well.
[s]This guy was a holocaust survivor, right? So that means that if the United States did not go to war, the Holocaust would have magically stopped due to Hitler's compassion for Jews?[/s]
"The only just war was the one against hitler" Elie Wiesel.
Youtube description: "Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel argues that war is inherently immoral because of the suffering and destruction it entails."
member. 
