The Honest Take

Natan Sharansky was five years old when Stalin died. His father took him aside, told him a miracle had saved the Jews, and told him never to repeat it. The next day at kindergarten he cried along with all the other children, with no idea which of them were really crying and which were crying like him. "That's the typical life of Soviet citizens," he says. "You say what you're supposed to say."

After 1967, that changed. Sharansky became a refusenik, one of the Soviet Jews refused permission to leave for Israel who decided to fight instead of wait. At the same time he became a spokesman for the Soviet human rights movement. He found his identity and his freedom together, "two for one price." In 1977 the KGB arrested him for treason. He was sentenced to 13 years and served nine before his release in February 1986. He describes the months in isolation, the interrogators who reminded him he could be sentenced to death, and the friend, Andrei Amalrik, who predicted that a regime spending all its energy on controlling people's minds would eventually exhaust itself.

In 2003, as the Israeli minister responsible for the diaspora, Sharansky toured American campuses. A Jewish graduate student at Harvard Business School told him she wanted to sign a letter supporting Israel but wouldn't, because three professors who mattered for her career weren't signing. "It's not in Moscow," he says. "It's in the Harvard Business School." Out of those years came his 3D test. When Israel is demonized, delegitimized or held to a double standard, he says, "that's antisemitism simply in the clothes of antizionism." He applies the test to the genocide charge, and he explains why he believes any student can criticize Israel's government without crossing those lines.

He also tells the story of Human Rights Watch, which began as Helsinki Watch to amplify Soviet dissidents like him, and of why its founder, Random House publisher Robert Bernstein, later broke with it publicly over Israel. "We really gave up on this banner of human rights," Sharansky says. He calls today's woke movement "primitive Bolshevism," and he argues that liberals made a huge mistake by confusing progressivism with liberalism. Then he answers the question at the heart of his new Tablet essay: how can the whole world believe something that isn't true? His answer comes from Ahad Ha'am's 1892 essay on the blood libel, and from the Passover Seder.

Also in this episode: listening to Voice of America through the jamming in a communal apartment; the Six-Day War as a Soviet humiliation; getting into the Soviet Union's top physics institute a year before the door closed on Jews; Jewish Voice for Peace and the Soviet antizionist committee; the silent majority who say nothing to stay in the WhatsApp group; Gorbachev, Reagan and "Free Sharansky"; why Amnesty International wouldn't separate dictatorships from democracies in its reports; Ben's comparison between a 25-minute standing ovation and Solzhenitsyn's story of the applause for Stalin; and the second Seder his family holds every year on the anniversary of his release.

NATAN SHARANSKY Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People, with Gil Troy (PublicAffairs, 2020): https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/natan-sharansky/never-alone/9781541742840/ Natan Sharansky, Chair of ISGAP: https://isgap.org/natan-sharansky/ Natan Sharansky at the Jewish Agency for Israel: https://www.jewishagency.org/natan-sharansky/

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Natan Sharansky, "Is the Whole World Wrong?", Tablet, Oct. 9, 2026: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/whole-world-is-wrong-natan-sharansky Natan Sharansky, "3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization," Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 2004: https://jcfa.org/article/3d-test-of-anti-semitism-demonization-double-standards-delegitimization/ Robert L. Bernstein, "Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast," The New York Times, 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20bernstein.html

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