Elie Wiesel And Susan B Anthony Essay

The purpose of this research paper is to compare and contrast Elie Wiesel and Susan B. Anthony, and their collective contributions, especially to the human rights movement and history. To this extent, I should first like to pro-offer some biographical information as well as background as it relates to the two. Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust, wrote poetry, received the Nobel Peace Prize, and he was a political activist. When Elie Wiesel delivered the speech “The Perils of Indifference,” he was already a recognized authority of political action and peace. In his speech, Wiesel describes himself as a trustworthy messenger. Susan B. Anthony was a prominent American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th-century women's rights movement to introduce women's

In his speech, The Perils of Indifference, Elie Wiesel suggests that during the years of what was to become World War II, before America finally became involved in the conflict, that the people in power at that time knew about the plight of the Jewish people. “And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew.” (Wiesel, 1999) Wiesel speaks of the deaths of millions of innocent victims at the hands of Adolf Hitler. They were, as Wiesel says earlier in the speech, “bystanders” (Wiesel, 1999) and were doing nothing to intervene. On the other hand, in On Women’s Right to Vote, Susan B. Anthony speaks of centuries of having to remain silent while “the elite,” are granted the right to decide the fate of a nation, the nation that women helped form. Women were belittled and forced to sit idly by while the privileged males ran the country. While the oppression shown to women was indeed horrible, this issue does not cause the immediate deaths of millions of innocent human beings. Many may ask, “How can you compare mass murder and voting oppression?”And yet, these two unrelated topics do have something in