On February 1, novelist and political activist Elie Wiesel was attacked and dragged out of an elevator in a San Francisco hotel. Wiesel, the author of the Holocaust memoir Night (Hill and Wang, 1960) and the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was a participant in a conference on religion taking place at the hotel. According to police, a man approached Wiesel in an elevator and insisted on interviewing Wiesel in his hotel room. The man then stopped the elevator on the sixth floor and dragged Wiesel out into the hallway. After Wiesel began yelling, the man fled, and Wiesel went to the lobby and called the police.
Wiesel, who was not injured, was escorted to the San Francisco airport by police officers. While no arrests have been made, a man identifying himself as "Eric Hunt" claimed responsibility for the attack last week in a post on a message board hosted by the Australian anti-Semitic Web site ZioPedia. In the post, which denied the existence of the Holocaust, the writer claimed that he was trying to force Wiesel to state that the events portrayed in Night are fictitious.
