OK, I'm not that shocked by Adam Shatz's LAT op-ed piece, because much of what he has to say about Elie Wiesel, Oprah's latest object of veneration, isn't really new. It's just that hardly anybody in the mainstream press actually comes out and says that Wiesel likes to squeeze all the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust out of the picture frame, or that he's consistently silent on Israeli human rights abuses. And Shatz, the literary editor at the Nation, is the only person I've seen so far whose commentary on the selection of Night for the book club moves beyond the artificial "is it fiction or memoir?" controversy.

That said, there's something not quite right about the criticism of "Oprah in Auschwitz," Shatz's dismissive term for the "recovery narrative" he expects to be projected onto Wiesel's talk-show appearance. "Not since 'Springtime for Hitler' have we been treated to a Holocaust production so surreal." Ahem. Apart from "Springtime for Hitler" not being a Holocaust production, isn't somebody forgetting Roberto Begnini's Life Is Beautiful, which—let's face it—can probably still far outstrip in mawkish sentimentality whatever Oprah comes up with next month?

Meanwhile, Blake Eskin issues an open warning to Wiesel that by appearing on Oprah's show right after James Frey, "[he] is also accepting her dangerously low threshold for how memoirs correspond to historical truth, and reducing himself to being another amazing storyteller on the talk-show circuit."