Elisha Wiesel
American businessman (born 1972) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shlomo Elisha Wiesel (born June 6, 1972) is an American businessman, hedge fund manager, social activist, and philanthropist. He worked for Goldman Sachs for 25 years, serving as its chief information officer for three years, until 2019. He currently co-runs the Niche Plus multi-manager hedge fund, the first fund of ClearAlpha Technologies, where he is a founding partner and the chief risk officer. He is also the chairman of Israeli fintech start-up vendor management firm entrio, and on the board of directors of American financial data and software company FactSet. In addition, he is the chairman of the board of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he is seeking to "reboot." He is the only child of Holocaust survivor, author, professor, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel.
Elisha Wiesel | |
|---|---|
| Born | Shlomo Elisha Wiesel June 6, 1972 |
| 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 |
|
Early and personal life
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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 a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp during the 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 his bris, the rabbi said: "A name has returned."[8]
His father, Elie Wiesel, was a Holocaust survivor, author, professor, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient of Hungarian Jewish and Romanian Jewish descent, whose hometown was Sighet, Romania.[1][9][6] Elisha's paternal grandmother and his father's younger sister were killed in the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp.[6] In 1965, Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem 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 about Hitler’s true downfall—that he was not successful in his attempts at making it that there be one less Vizhnitzer Chassid 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 in Vienna, Austria, of Austrian Jewish descent, who came to the United States shortly after World War II with her family, with the help of HIAS, 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 the Elie 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 the Upper West Side and Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, attending Modern Orthodox yeshiva Ramaz on the Upper East Side, and suburban New 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 from computer programming of computer games to electric guitar, interested in heavy metal bands such as Iron Maiden and Metallica, but also in the punk band the Ramones.[20][11][21]
Wiesel then attended Yale University, graduating with a B.S. in computer science in 1994.[19][6] At one point in his freshman year, he sported a purple mohawk 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 to shul 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]
Career
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Goldman Sachs
Wiesel joined the J. Aron commodities division of Goldman Sachs in 1994, after the head of J. Aron strats (the code-writers whose computer models and algorithms power the firm's trading desks) convinced him to give up his initial preference of working in the video game industry.[24][25][1][9][26] At the time, technology was in its earliest days in banking.[27] At Goldman he worked for Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, who ended up leading the firm.[28] One day Blankfein criticized him in the lobby of Goldman's headquarters as he arrived on rollerblades, 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 the chief 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 succeeded R. Martin Chavez as Goldman's chief 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]
Board memberships
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 that Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie 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 on Michael 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 for social justice, but also understood that ... the answer is not Marxism."[2] He also began an archive of his father's writings.[2]
In November 2020 Wiesel joined Israeli Tel Aviv-based fintech start-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, financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider FactSet appointed Wiesel to its board of directors.[42] The company as of 2025 had 37 offices in 20 countries, and 216,000 users.[43]
Niche Plus hedge fund
In May 2023, Wiesel and quantitative investment firm AQR Capital Management alumnus Brian Hurst launched and began co-running the Niche Plus multimanager hedge fund, the first fund of ClearAlpha Technologies, where he is a founding partner and CRO.[44][45][46] The firm launched with commitments of several hundred million dollars from AQR founder Cliff Asness, Stable Asset Management, and other institutional investors.[45][46] The fund is focusing on niche strategies, including temperature arbitrage.[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]
Philanthropy
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-solving scavenger hunt throughout New York City, popular among Wall Street professionals.[50][19] It has raised millions of dollars for charitable non-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 the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he is seeking to "reboot."[57][58] In February 2024, he announced that the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and the Florida Holocaust Museum would house his father's papers and artifacts.[59]
Political activity
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LGBT discrimination; Syrian refugees
At a November 2016, event at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wiesel spoke of the need to protect the LGBT 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-elect Donald Trump's policies that dismissed Syrian refugees, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, women, and African Americans.[60] At another event held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in January 2017, he suggested that protesting against Executive 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 the March of the Living program at Auschwitz for Holocaust Remembrance Day, he said that the United States and European countries had not learned the lessons of the Holocaust, because many in those countries had turned away Syrian refugees fleeing chemical warfare. Wiesel added: "Will you stand by when African-Americans have reason to be terrified of a routine traffic stop, when Christians are slaughtered in Egypt because they are labelled infidels, when girls in Chad, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are threatened, raped, or shot for pursuing an education, when homosexuality in Iran is a crime that carries the death penalty?"[62][63][64]
Jewish–Black relations
In December 2022, taking a stand together against the increasing instances of racism and antisemitism in the US, Wiesel joined New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Rev. Al Sharpton, Vista Equity Partners CEO and Carnegie Hall Chairman Robert F. Smith, Baptist Minister Conrad Tillard, and World Values Network founder and CEO Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to host 15 Days of Light, celebrating Hanukkah and Kwanzaa 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]
The Uyghurs
Wiesel is passionate about bringing attention to the plight of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group that lives in a region in China.[57][67] Approximately one million of them are held in China-run internment camps, and are subjected to forced labor and forced sterilizations.[57] In March 2023, he testified at a hearing on the subject before the U.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 from forced Uyghur labor, and forced 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 lived Jewish 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]
Israel; antisemitism
Wiesel was as of 2020 a board member of the progressive Zionist organization Zioness, founded by Amanda 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 with progressive 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 fight defensive wars."[71]
In November 2023, giving a speech at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, he said that the IDF seeks to avoid civilian casualties, that those calling for ceasefire should be asked what they think will happen if Israel enters into one that allows Hamas to re-arm, that U.N. Secretary-General António 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 the Hamas 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 "Sadly Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza brought only terror rather than peace, but we are not giving up."[57] That same month, speaking about calls on Columbia University's campus for an intifada, 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 obviously antisemitic, and that the accusation that Israel was genocidal was blood libel, echoing the blood libels of the Holocaust in Europe.[73] In May 2024, he wrote in The Hill: "There is no moral equivalence to be drawn between terrorists, who see citizens as human 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 the Conservative Party and of the Official Opposition Pierre Poilievre and co-deputy leader Melissa 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 between Holocaust denial and denial 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 in USA 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 behind human 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]
References
External links
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