Natan Sharansky
Natan SharanskyCourtesy

Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy discuss their new book, “Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People.”

Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a commentator on politics and other issues. He is Professor of History at McGill University and was a 2015 visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Natan Sharansky is an Israeli politician, human rights activist, and author who, as a refusenik in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, spent nine years in Soviet prisons. He served as chairman of the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018. He currently serves as the chairman of the Institute of the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

In 1977, Natan Sharansky, a leading activist in the democratic dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the movement for free Jewish emigration, was arrested by the KGB. He spent nine years as a political prisoner, convicted of treason against the state. Every day, Sharansky fought for individual freedom in the face of overt tyranny, a struggle that would come to define the rest of his life.

“Never Alone” reveals how Sharansky's years in prison, many spent in harsh solitary confinement, prepared him for a very public life after his release. As an Israeli politician and the head of the Jewish Agency, Sharansky brought extraordinary moral clarity and uncompromising, often uncomfortable, honesty. His story is suffused with reflections from his time as a political prisoner, from his seat at the table as history unfolded in Israel and the Middle East, and from his passionate efforts to unite the Jewish people.

Written with frankness, affection, and humor, the book offers us profound insights from a man who embraced the essential human struggle: to find his own voice, his own faith, and the people to whom he could belong.