In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, activist, writer, professor and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told the audience, “your choice transcends my person.”

“Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished, of whom you have spoken? Do I have the right to accept this honor on their behalf?  Does anyone? I do not,” he said. “No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions ...And yet at moments such as this, at all moments. I sense their presence. I always do.”

Wiesel died on Saturday, leaving his wife Marion, his son Shlomo, a legacy of political activism, civil rights work, and a fifty-seven books. Attorney, writer and professor emeritus at Harvard Law Alan Dershowitz joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio to discuss the life of Wiesel, who had been a close friend.

“His two favorite words in the English language were, ‘and yet.’ Even in the Nobel Prize [speech], he said ‘can I represent the people that were killed, no, and yet.’ he always said that, those were his two favorite words,” Dershowitz said. “If I were going to put any words on his tombstone, it would be ‘and yet.’ He understood irony, he understood complexity, he didn’t know what to do about it in every instance, but he knew we should do more than we’re doing.”

Dershowitz described himself as a ‘mentee’ of Wiesel’s. They worked together to assist victims of persecution around the world, developing a friendship along the way. “It’s a difficult time not only for his friends but for humanity,” Dershowitz said. “He’ll never be replaced as a spokesperson for the victimized.”

Elie Wiesel made it his life’s work to remember the atrocities of the holocaust and to use those memories, as he put it, to make sure it would not become the future for generations to come. As his prestige grew, he maintained what he described as “an emotional bond” with Israel, facing criticism for rarely speaking out against Israeli actions.

According to Dershowitz, criticism of Wiesel regarding the occupation of Palestinian territories is misguided. “He was very supportive of the Palestinians, he supported a two-state solution, [and] I can tell you that in private, he pushed very hard for Israel to do more to ease the situation in Gaza and on the West Bank, but he understood that there were among the Palestinians those who didn’t want peace, and those who would engage in terrorism,” Dershowitz said. “He made a sharp distinction between Palestinian children and women and innocent people who would suffer, and those who were standing in the way of peace. So he was very empathetic to the Palestinian people, he was just not empathetic to those who refused to recognize the need for a two-state solution and peace.”

In that same Nobel speech, Wiesel said, “[suffering] applies also to Palestinians, to whose plight I am sensitive, but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence. . . . They are frustrated; that is understandable.”

According to Dershowitz, criticism of Wiesel arose not because he loved the Palestinians too little, but because he loved the Israelis too much. “You read today, on the internet, there are so many false charges against him,” he said. “The charge that he failed to stand up against the Armenian genocide...he did. I was with him when he spoke and declared the genocide to be a genocide against the Armenian people. It was sometimes difficult for him to do that, because his love for Israel and the Jewish people was so profound.”

Wiesel received the Nobel prize for Night, a work based on his experienced as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. After ten years of silence on the subject, he wrote Night in Yiddish. “It was a somewhat different book,” Dershowitz said. “It was much angrier.”

The book was largely ignored until a prominent French literary figure came upon it, and endorsed it, and wrote it in French. It was translated into English, word of mouth spread, ““I don’t think he ever expected more than a few thousand people to read Night,” Dershowitz said. “He was always flabbergasted by the fact that it caught on.”

Elie Wiesel died at home in Manhattan, at the age of 87, after a 50-year friendship with Dershowitz. “He was brave and bold in the face of death, which he knew was coming,” Dershowitz said. “He was a brave, brave man. I think the bravest men and women are those who do have fears, and overcome them. Not the fearless or the foolhardy, who never experience fear. He was a brave man who overcame his fear.”

To hear the full interview, click on the audio link above.