Refuseniks and Rights Defenders: Jews and the Soviet Dissident Movement
Wednesday, February 5, 2025 | 5:00-7:00 PM | HG 1030
The exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union transformed the Jewish landscape on three continents and has been called the preeminent case of Jewish human rights activism. It is often identified – and confused – with the Soviet dissident movement and the struggle for rights in Russia. What brought the two movements together – and what kept them apart? This talk explores the ideas, the people, and the politics that animated the most consequential forms of resistance to the twentieth century’s longest-lived experiment in totalitarian rule, and their consequences for the world today.
Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement came out in 2024. Nathans’ multiple prizewinning book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia has been translated into Hebrew and Russian. He is co-editor, most recently, of From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Polish and Russian Lineages. He chaired an international committee of scholars hired by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the New York-based museum design firm, to help create the Jewish Museum in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Nathans is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and other periodicals.
Related Event:
Desperately Seeking General Readers: A Roundtable on Academics Who Venture into the World of Agents, Advances, and Popular Publishing
Wednesday, February 5, 2025 | 12:30-1:30 PM | HG 1002
An informal panel discussion between visiting historian Benjamin Nathans and UCI psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and philosopher James Weatherall, all authors of at least one trade book, and acquisitions editor Dylan Kyung-Lim White of Stanford University Press.
This a brown bag seminar, so feel free to bring your own lunch to eat while listening.
Sponsored by the Forum for the Academy and the Public and the History Department.
