The Raoul Wallenberg Annual Program, funded by Leon and Toby Cooperman
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?
Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania) will explore 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. Nathans’s new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, is a renowned scholar of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. His most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024) was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction as well as the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize. His multiple prizewinning book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press, 2004) has been translated into Hebrew and Russian. Nathans chaired an international committee of scholars that helped create the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. He contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and other periodicals.