Leon Wieseltier also took pleasure in studying with Wiesel. The two would spend time on the phone analyzing, say, a poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik, or a rabbinical text or midrash. Wieseltier prized the “depth and intricacy of his Jewish cultivation.” “His Hebrew was gorgeous, his Yiddish was gorgeous. He had studied Talmud with Saul Lieberman. He knew poetry. He knew Yiddish song, Jewish liturgy. Elie was one of the few Jews I have known who bothered to inherit the entirety of the civilization that was bequeathed to them.”
–Joseph Berger, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, 293
