Elisha Wiesel | |
|---|---|
| Born | Shlomo Elisha Wiesel (1972-06-06)June 6, 1972 (age 52) |
| Alma mater | Yale University (B.S., Computer Science, 1994) |
| Employer(s) | ClearAlpha Technologies and its first fund -- Niche Plus |
| Known for |
|
| Title | Chairman |
| Board member of | entrio;FactSet;Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity |
| Spouse | Lynn Bartner-Wiesel |
| Children | 2 |
| Parents |
|
Shlomo Elisha Wiesel (born June 6, 1972) is an American businessman,hedge fund manager, social activist, and philanthropist. He worked forGoldman Sachs for 25 years, serving as itschief information officer for three years, until 2019. He currently co-runs theNiche Plus multi-managerhedge fund, the first fund ofClearAlpha Technologies, where he is a founding partner and the chief risk officer. He is also the chairman of Israelifintechstart-up vendor management firm entrio, and on the board of directors of Americanfinancial data and software companyFactSet. In addition, he is the chairman of the board of theElie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he is seeking to "reboot." He is the only child ofHolocaust survivor, author, professor, andNobel Peace Prize recipientElie Wiesel.
Shlomo Elisha Wiesel (who goes by his middle name Elisha) was born in 1972.[1][2]
He was named Shlomo Elisha, after his paternal grandfather, Shlomo, who died at age 50 after adeath march to theBuchenwald concentration camp duringthe Holocaust, and Elisha meaning "God is salvation."[3][4][5][6] Elie Wiesel wrote that their son's birth "will mark my existence forever. The little fellow in the arms of his mother will illuminate our life."[7] At hisbris, the rabbi said: "A name has returned."[8]
His father,Elie Wiesel, was aHolocaust survivor, author, professor, activist, andNobel Peace Prize recipient ofHungarian Jewish andRomanian Jewish descent, whose hometown wasSighet,Romania.[1][9][6] Elisha's paternal grandmother and his father's younger sister were killed in thegas chambers in theAuschwitz concentration camp.[6] In 1965,Lubavitcher RabbiMenachem M. Schneerson wrote a letter to Elie Wiesel that Elisha Wiesel later said led directly to Elisha being born in the first place, writing: "You must make every effort to tear yourself away from your memories and adopt a lifestyle with a stable structure—married life—and establish a Jewish home and a Jewish family. This will certainly bring aboutHitler’s true downfall—that he was not successful in his attempts at making it that there be one lessVizhnitzerChassid in the world. On the contrary, you will raise children and grandchildren who are Vizhnitzer Chassidim until the end of time."[10] Elie Wiesel married four years later, and Elisha was born three years after that.[10]
Elisha's mother,Marion Wiesel, was a Holocaust survivor born inVienna, Austria, ofAustrian Jewish descent, who came to the United States shortly after World War II with her family, with the help ofHIAS, then known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.[11][2] She and Elie Wiesel married in 1969.[10] She became a social justice activist and a translator, translating 14 of her husband's books from French to English.[3][2][12][11][13][14] In 1986, his parents used the money from his father's Nobel Peace Prize that year to establish theElie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which combats discrimination and injustice, promotes international dialogue, and teaches children to not be indifferent to the suffering of others.[15][16][17]
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He was raised on theUpper West Side andUpper East Side ofManhattan in New York City, attendingModern Orthodox yeshivaRamaz on the Upper East Side, and suburbanNew Jersey.[6][18][11] When he was six years old, Wiesel and his family lived in Israel for a few months.[19] His parents spoke French at home.[11] As a teenager, he moved fromcomputer programming ofcomputer games toelectric guitar, interested inheavy metal bands such asIron Maiden andMetallica, but also in thepunk band theRamones.[20][11][21]
Wiesel then attendedYale University, graduating with a B.S. incomputer science in 1994.[19][6] At one point in his freshman year, he sported a purplemohawk haircut.[20][1][22] He recalled: “I remember I came home from college with a purple mohawk my freshman year, and my dad was not fazed. He said: ‘I love you, and I would walk down the street with you any time, anywhere. I am not embarrassed. I would take you toshul like this and out to dinner. I love you. You are my son. You can do anything you want as long as you marry Jewish.'"[23] After graduating from Yale, he spent a few months doing basic military training in Israel.[19]
Wiesel and his wife Lynn Bartner-Wiesel have two children.[19][6]
Wiesel joined the J. Aroncommodities division ofGoldman Sachs in 1994, after the head of J. Aron strats (thecode-writers whosecomputer models andalgorithms power the firm'strading desks) convinced him to give up his initial preference of working in thevideo game industry.[24][25][1][9][26] At the time, technology was in its earliest days in banking.[27] At Goldman he worked forLloyd Blankfein andGary Cohn, who ended up leading the firm.[28] One day Blankfein criticized him in the lobby of Goldman's headquarters as he arrived onrollerblades, saying: "I’m invested in that head, get a helmet!"[28]
He became a managing director in 2002, and a partner in 2004.[29][30] Wiesel later served as thechief risk officer of its securities division (which houses Goldman's technology-intensive trading business), and global head of its securities division desk strategists.[1][9][31]
In January 2017, when Wiesel was 44 years old, he succeededR. Martin Chavez as Goldman'schief information officer, overseeing Engineering (the firm's Technology Division and global strategists groups).[24][32][25] Wiesel became the highest-ranked of 9,000 Goldman engineers, who accounted for 25% of the firm's total employees.[26] In July 2017,Institutional Investor named him # 10 in the "2017 Tech 40."[26]
In December 2019 Wiesel left Goldman Sachs after a 25-year career at the firm.[1][9][6] As he considered his next move, he said he was interested in the intersection of philanthropy and engineering, and was ready to move on from banking. He was considering options that included traveling the world, computer games, and teaching, while intrigued by the health care company thatJeff Bezos,Warren Buffett, andJamie Dimon were building, and committed to spending more time working on matters relating to his father such as deciding on the disposition of his papers.[28] He volunteered onMichael Bloomberg's presidential campaign, and reflected later that his was the balance Wiesel was looking for in the political spectrum — "people who understood the need forsocial justice, but also understood that ... the answer is notMarxism."[2] He also began an archive of his father's writings.[2]
In November 2020 Wiesel joined Israeli Tel Aviv-basedfintechstart-up vendor management firm entrio (formerly, The Floor), as chairman of its board of directors.[33][34][35][36] The firm entrio is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides software that helps banks better manage their IT operations and internal and external technology integration, making them more efficient, less costly, and less complex.[37][38][35][36] At entrio, Wiesel focuses on helping the firm expand and partner with more banks and investors.[35][36][39] In April 2023 the company announced that it had raised $7.5 million from Communitas Capital Partners,BNY Mellon, Vintage Investment Partners, and Alicorn Venture Partners.[40][41]
In March 2023, financialdigital platform andenterprise solutions providerFactSet appointed Wiesel to its board of directors.[42] The company as of 2025 had 37 offices in 20 countries, and 216,000 users.[43]
In May 2023, Wiesel and quantitative investment firmAQR Capital Management alumnus Brian Hurst launched and began co-running theNiche Plus multimanagerhedge fund, the first fund ofClearAlpha Technologies, where he is a founding partner andCRO.[44][45][46] The firm launched with commitments of several hundred million dollars from AQR founderCliff Asness, Stable Asset Management, and otherinstitutional investors.[45][46] The fund is focusing on niche strategies, including temperaturearbitrage.[46] It will have 13 teams, running 20 different strategies.[45] The fund said it expected to collect $1 billion within a year.[45][46]
Wiesel organized fundraisers and has served as a board member for Good Shepherd Services, a Brooklyn-based after-school program charity that provides support for at-risk youths and their families, at Goldman beginning in 2013.[47][1][48][49] He also became well known for organizing, producing, and co-creating from 2012 to 2015 the content of the popular all-night Midnight Madness problem-solvingscavenger hunt throughout New York City, popular amongWall Street professionals.[50][19] It has raised millions of dollars for charitablenon-profits.[28][51][52][49][53][54][55] Wiesel referred to its participants as "intellectual athletes."[56]
Wiesel is the Chairman of the Board of theElie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he is seeking to "reboot."[57][58] In February 2024, he announced that theUniversity of South Florida St. Petersburg and theFlorida Holocaust Museum would house his father's papers and artifacts.[59]
At a November 2016, event at theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wiesel spoke of the need to protect theLGBT community as well as Israel, which he said was "treated as the world villain simply for making sure that Jews will never again be without a home." He criticized president-electDonald Trump's policies that dismissed Syrian refugees, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, women, and African Americans.[60] At another event held at theMuseum of Jewish Heritage in January 2017, he suggested that protesting againstExecutive Order 13769 ("Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States") was part of his father's legacy.[61]
In April 2017, in a speech to theMarch of the Living program at Auschwitz forHolocaust Remembrance Day, he said that the United States and European countries had not learned the lessons ofthe Holocaust, because many in those countries had turned awaySyrian refugees fleeingchemical warfare. Wiesel added: "Will you stand by when African-Americans have reason to be terrified of a routine traffic stop, whenChristians are slaughtered in Egypt because they are labelledinfidels, when girls in Chad, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are threatened, raped, or shot for pursuing an education, whenhomosexuality in Iran is a crime that carries the death penalty?"[62][63][64]
In December 2022, taking a stand together against the increasing instances of racism and antisemitism in the US, Wiesel joined New York City MayorEric Adams, Rev.Al Sharpton,Vista Equity Partners CEO andCarnegie Hall ChairmanRobert F. Smith, Baptist MinisterConrad Tillard, and World Values Network founder and CEO RabbiShmuley Boteach to host 15 Days of Light, celebratingHanukkah andKwanzaa in a unifying holiday ceremony at Carnegie Hall.[65] Wiesel said: "The Wiesel family stands now and will always stand with the Black community against racism and the lingering economic effects of slavery and segregation in this country. And we are so moved to hear leaders in the Black community like Mayor Adams, Rev Sharpton, and Rev Tillard speak out so strongly against antisemitism."[66]
Wiesel is passionate about bringing attention to theplight of theUyghurs, a mostlyMuslim ethnic group that lives in a region in China.[57][67] Approximately one million of them are held in China-runinternment camps, and are subjected toforced labor andforced sterilizations.[57] In March 2023, he testified at a hearing on the subject before theU.S. House Select Committee on China.[68] In April 2024, together with Uyghur leaders he launched a two-day conference in New York City, which included multifaith panels and Uyghur camp survivors discussing how teachings from the Holocaust can be applied to address the Uyghur crisis, China’s media censorship and propaganda, companies benefiting fromforced Uyghur labor, andforced assimilation.[57][69] Asked why this was important to him, as it was not a Jewish issue nor an Israeli issue, he said:
My father livedJewish values on the world stage and believed that to be Jewish is to engage with the world... And that’s what we’re doing, frankly, because the Chinese Communist Party really is guilty of some significant atrocities against a minority population that poses no threat to them. The fight for freedom and liberation is a Jewish story that dates back thousands of years. That is what this is about, a fight for freedom and liberation for the Uyghurs.... I am very proud that we are bringing together Jewish and Muslim voices to stand against the oppression of the Uyghur people and to know that these communities can work together to find common cause.[57]
Wiesel was as of 2020 a board member of the progressive Zionist organization Zioness, founded byAmanda Berman.[2][70] In October 2021, lamenting the embrace of some young progressives of ill-founded anti-Israel tropes, he said "it's such a shame because I think if you look at Jewish activism over the past century in this country, so much of it has been aligned withprogressive ideals... And then to discover that within these communities, this hate can take hold. I think there's really two parts of it – one is that there are definitely conscious actors out there looking to seed lies and hatred among people that are very impressionable and very passionate. And... I think that there is a fair amount of ignorance. We've gotten intellectually lazy as a country, and Israel-Palestine is hard, so who wants to sit there and do the work to understand the truth of what it means that Israel has had to fightdefensive wars."[71]
In November 2023, giving a speech at the92nd Street Y in Manhattan, he said that theIDF seeks to avoidcivilian casualties, that those calling for ceasefire should be asked what they think will happen if Israel enters into one that allowsHamas to re-arm, that U.N. Secretary-GeneralAntónio Guterres should consider that when the Arab nations chose to wage war rather than accept a Palestinian state in 1948, in 2000, and in 2008.[72] He also said that the claim of genocide against Israel fails primarily on intent inasmuch as theHamas charter calls for Israel’s destruction while in contrast Israel’s charter calls for peace and coexistence, and that it is a pattern that enemies of the Jews accuse the Jews of the crimes that they themselves perpetrate.[72]
In April 2024, speaking about Gaza from 2005 on, he said "SadlyIsrael’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza brought onlyterror rather than peace, but we are not giving up."[57] That same month, speaking aboutcalls on Columbia University's campus for anintifada, he said he said that calls for expulsion of the Jewish people from the State of Israel and "from the river to the sea" were obviouslyantisemitic, and that the accusation that Israel was genocidal wasblood libel, echoing the blood libels of the Holocaust in Europe.[73] In May 2024, he wrote inThe Hill: "There is nomoral equivalence to be drawn between terrorists, who see citizens ashuman shields or targets for rape, and an army that seeks to protect innocent lives."[74] In July 2024, he met in Canada with the leader of theConservative Party and of theOfficial OppositionPierre Poilievre and co-deputy leaderMelissa Lantsman, and shared, as he put it: "my deep gratitude with [them] for standing with the Jewish people no matter how loud the haters scream.”[10] He said that it was a complete fiction that the educated class are immune to antisemitism and anti-Americanism, as demonstrated by the chants of "Death to America" on Columbia's campus.[73] In December 2024, he drew a comparison betweenHolocaust denial anddenial surrounding the atrocities of October 7, 2023, including the notions that "Jews deserved it. It was just a few evil leaders. The local population did not know about it and did not support it."[75][76]
In January 2025 he wrote an op-ed inUSA Today, in which Wiesel said: "Today, only 40% of people under 35 recognize the Holocaust as historically accurate... in the Middle East... only 16%.... But the problem is worse than ignorance. Many in the younger generation ... see today’s Hamas fighters as victims just as surely as the Israelis [who Hamas] kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023. To them, Hamas is the underdog hero... Is it mass gullibility? Good intentions gone wrong? ... It is easier to believe that this militant mob wants their own state than to hear... what they shout: that their mission, as the Hamas charter states, is the eradication of Israel... Will we continue explaining away ... Palestinian civilians celebrating − and actively aiding Hamas − in the Oct. 7 attacks...? Will we continue confusing ... perpetrator and victim, of terror and a just war, losing the distinction between Hamas, who hide behindhuman shields, and the Israel Defense Forces, who do more than any army ever has to avoid loss of life while bombing the tunnels built to facilitate the next Holocaust? ... To differentiate good from evil, one must begin by choosing between truth and lies."[77]
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