Joshua Rubenstein
Joshua Rubenstein has been involved with human rights and international affairs for more than twenty-five years. He is the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and a longtime associate at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian Studies. Overseeing Amnesty's work in New England, New York, and New Jersey, Rubenstein has acted as Amnesty's spokesperson in numerous radio, television, and print interviews. He has also lectured widely on the Soviet human rights movement, including a series of lectures in Russian at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in 1990-91. He has contributed articles and reviews on Soviet and international affairs to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. Stalin's Secret Pogrom is Rubenstein's third significant contribution to the study of Russian history. The New York Review of Books called his first book, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, "sympathetic, scholarly, and comprehensive." Rubenstein is also the author of Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, a biography of the controversial Soviet writer and journalist, which the New York Times Book Review called "convincing, judicious, and enjoyable."
"Mr. Rubenstein fills in the historical background of the 15 victims, bringing them to life in biographical sketches, showing their records of achievement before their arrests and their varying degrees of complicity in their own victimization and their resistance to it. What might have been a dry document of bureaucratic terror, a bloodless verbatim text, turns out to be a vivid, tragic panorama full of prickly individuals." —The New York Times
News
Joshua Rubenstein is currently working on a biography of Trotsky for Yale University Press.Links
Joshua Rubenstein's official websiteBooks
Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, Joshua Rubenstein--a highly regarded authority on Soviet history, human rights, and international affairs--provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long, compellingly written introduction, he draws on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States to set the trial in historical and political context and to offer a wrenching account of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign. Because much misinformation appears in respected English language works on the subject, and because the trial sheds so much light on the Jewish Question in the Soviet Union, Stalin's Secret Pogrom serves as an important corrective. Its revelations about the behavior of the defendants, who were tortured and held in isolation for more than three years, may prove controversial (almost all of them denounced each other in the trial and abased themselves in last-ditch attempts to save their lives). Certainly it provides a frightfully dramatic picture of the anti-Jewish character of Stalin's regime during his last year.
(Yale University Press, October 2005)
Tangled Loyalties
The definitive biography of the world-famous writer who survived five decades of Communism and whose life symbolizes the dilemma of Russian intellectuals in this century
Ilya Ehrenburg is one of the most important and controversial Russian cultural forces of the twentieth century, whose life spanned the tumultuous time from Lenin to Brezhnev. He was one of the few distinguished writers to survive Stalin. As a Jew, Ehrenburg is said to have betrayed his people; as a writer, his talent; as a man, his conscience. Tangled Loyalties cuts through rumor and accusation to explore the paradoxes of Ehrenburg's career and illuminate intellectual life under communism.
In rich and vivid detail, drawing extensively on Ehrenburg's memoirs and writings and on the recollections of his family and friends, Tangled Loyalties uncovers the man behind this controversial life. The young Bolshevik who turned anti-communist and then, two decades later, became a spokesman for Stalin. The assimilated Jew who fought anti-Semitism. The Russian patriot who was denounced by Communists as a foreigner and by Hitler as his main enemy. The journalist who reached the peak of his official prestige under Stalin at a time when close friends were arrested and disappeared.
Ehrenburg embodies the moral complexities of this turbulent time. His survival required almost daily acts of political calculation, yet he held on to his integrity: Ehrenburg helped artists and friends - including Anna Akhamtova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak; battled censorship; and championed European art in Moscow.
Rubenstein neither condemns nor apologizes for Ehrenburg. Instead he portrays him as a man of great gifts whose life reflected all of the dilemmas of a Russian intellectual under communism. This major biography will provoke controversy and rekindle interest in one of the century's most intriguing intellectuals.
