The campaign to gain freedom for Soviet Jewry is often identified with—but often confused—with the Soviet dissident movement to gain rights in the former Soviet Union. However, there are issues that brought the two movements together and others that kept them apart.
In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, Benjamin Nathans explores a movement that transformed the Jewish landscape on three continents as it became a focal point for Jewish rights activism.
On Monday, Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m. he will speak at a program, Refuseniks and Rights Defenders: Jews and the Soviert Dissident Movement,” at the annual Raoul Wallenberg program of Rutgers University’s Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life. The program will be held at the Douglass Student Center in New Brunswick.
Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a renowned scholar of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history and the history of human rights. This latest book won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction as well as the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize. A previous book, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, won numerous prizes and has been translated into Hebrew and Russian. He also chaired an international committee of scholars that helped create the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.
The program is free, but registration is required at bildnercenter.rutgers.edu.
Congregation Torat El in Oakhurst will kick off this season’s Meet the Author Series on Oct. 26 at 11 a.m. with Mary Morris who will speak about her book, The Red House. The book intertwines the story of a daughter searching for answers about her vanished mother with that of the largely untold story of Italian Jews during World War II.
The story revolves around Viola, who mysteriously went missing 30 years ago never to be heard from again, leaving behind her purse, keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Her artist daughter, Laura, kept the paintings, all of which had written on the back in Italian, “I will not be here forever.” The family never understood what Viola meant.
Years later at a crossroads in her marriage, Laura returned to Italy, where her parents met and where she spent her earliest years looking for answers about the mysterious red house.
Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels Gateway to the Moon, The Jazz Palace, A Mother’s Love, and House Arrest. Among her nonfiction works is Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in
Literature and the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction.
Copies of the book can be purchased from Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores or amazon.com.
Cost is $20 in advance or $25 at the door and includes a light brunch. For reservations go to torat-el.org or call 732-531-4410.
Yonah Jeremy Bob, the Jerusalem Post’s senior military correspondent, intelligence analyst and literary editor, will appear 7 p.m. at the Marlboro Jewish Center on Monday, Oct. 27. His topic will be The Hottest Diplomacy, Security, Politics and U.S.- Israel Relations Issues Facing Israel.
Bob covers the Israeli military, Mossad, Shin Bet, defense technologies, Iran’s weapons of mass destruction, cyberwarfare and war crimes for the publication. He has close connections with many Israeli intelligence figures and previously worked in the Israeli military international law division, at the Israeli Embassy to the UN and in the Israeli Justice Ministry.
He is the author of the award winning book Target Tehran, about the Mossad’s secret war against Iran’s nuclear program and its role in the Abraham Accords, which received the Jewish Book Council/Natan Award for 2024. A native of Baltimore, Bob is also the author of Justice in the West Bank?
For information, call (732) 536-2300 or mjcnj.com.
A story about dating, ambition and the coming of age in a Syrian Jewish family forms the plot of the debut novel of author Esther Chehebar who will appear on Wednesday, October 29 at 1:30 p.m. at the Barbara Kagan Littman Book and Author Series of the Jewish Federation in the Heart of New Jersey. The event will take place in Long Branch with the location provided upon registration.
The book revolves around the lives of three sisters in Brooklyn’s Syrian community who are expected to marry and raise children in the neighborhood as did their parents and grandparents. It explores the love stories of the sisters-Nina, Fortune and Lucy. The middle sister, Fortune–named for a living grandmother as is community tradition–is engaged to be married but has secretly begun to question her engagement. The oldest sister, Lucy, at age 26 is almost a spinster by community standards while the youngest Lucy, although in high school, has begun sneaking around with a charming older man.
Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet Magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community. Her first book, I Share My Name, is an illustrated children’s book explaining the Sephardic tradition of naming children for their grandparents.
The book discussion will be facilitated by Allyson Crystal. Coffee, fruit and pastries will be served. There is a minimum donation of $54 to attend. Register at jewishheartnj.ticketspice.com/2025-barbara-kagan-littman-book-and-author. For information contact Audrey Napchen at Audreyn@jewishheartnj.org or (732) 588-1804.
