PROGRAM

Please join us at Roosevelt House as we welcome Natan Sharansky for a conversation on his life and work.

A leading figure in the Soviet dissident movements on the 1970s, he was known as Anatoly Scharansky.  He spent nine years in prison and labor camps on a bogus charge of “treason.”  After his release he went to Israel to join his beloved wife Avital and became Natan Sharansky.  He wrote a classic memoir of his time in the Gulag, Fear No Evil, and became deeply involved in Israeli life, eventually becoming a deputy Prime Minister.  He is now the head of the Jewish Agency, a principal conduit between Israel and the global Jewish Diaspora.  He is an ardent advocate for democracy in a world of tyrannical regimes and the grandfather of six.

Mr. Sharansky will be in conversation with Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books and a member of the Roosevelt House advisory board.  Osnos was a correspondent and editor at The Washington Post and spent three years in Moscow in the mid-1970s where he came to know Sharansky.  At Random House, Osnos was the editor of Fear No Evil and at PublicAffairs, he was the publisher of Sharansky’s two subsequent books on democracy and identity.  Osnos is currently an adjunct professor in Roosevelt House’s Human Rights Program.