Marion Wiesel, the wife and primary translator of Elie Wiesel, died on Sunday at the age of ninety-four. Alex Traub writes of her life:

Mary Renate (also sometimes spelled Renata) Erster was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1931. Her father, Emil, owned a furniture store. He and Mary watched from a street corner as Nazi troops took over Vienna. A long flight ensued. . . . During a brief period in Belgium, Mary attended school. She announced to her classmates that she had shed her first name—which was inspired by her mother’s love of Americana—and that from then on she would be called Marion.

The family spent time at Gurs, a French concentration camp, then fled to Marseille, where they narrowly avoided detection thanks to the protection of neighbors.

Besides encouraging her husband in his public career, and helping him compose some of his most notable speeches, Marion also helped immortalize the photographs of Roman Vishniac, which famously captured the lives of traditional Jews in pre-World War II Europe. Seth Mandel describes how she put her “artistic eye” to publishing his work.

Vishniac’s most famous work, aside from his portraits of figures like Albert Einstein, is A Vanished World, a collection of his shtetl photography first published in 1947 and then reworked into a definitive 1983 version. That latter version included an introduction by Vishniac’s friend Elie Wiesel. Throughout the next decade, Vishniac worked with Marion Wiesel on a follow-up collection. He would not live to see its completion and publication, but Marion would. The result, To Give Them Light, is a haunting masterpiece.

Traub also takes note of her philanthropic activities:

Using money from Mr. Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Prize, the couple founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Mrs. Wiesel took the lead in managing the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, which provide schooling and other support to Jewish children of Ethiopian origin, who have faced challenges integrating into Israeli society. The initiative is ongoing and reaches hundreds of children every year,

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.