Jewish authors borrow from the past in new ‘mini-genre’ of ‘how-to’ activism literature |
JTA — In the crowded canon of books about how to change the world, few loom as large as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Published in 1971, the manual distilled decades of organizing wisdom into what Alinsky, a seasoned organizer on behalf of better housing, jobs and schools, called “a pragmatic primer for realist radicals.”
Although Alinsky, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home before leaving religious observance behind, rarely foregrounded his Jewishness, the book begins with an epigraph from the Talmudic sage Hillel: “Where there are no men, be thou a man.”
“Rules for Radicals” was written at a time of epic social upheaval in the United States, and it was read avidly by Vietnam War protesters, feminists, civil rights activists and warriors on poverty. More than half a century later, a new mini-genre of “how-to” books about dissent and activism has emerged, drawing lessons from past protests for the era of “No Kings” rallies, Black Lives Matter marches and the campus pro-Palestinian encampments.
Coincidentally but intriguingly, three of these books were written by Jewish authors who, explicitly or not, are offering advice on resistance drawing on Jewish wisdom, role models and historical precedents.
The three books — “How to Be a Dissident” by Gal Beckerman; the forthcoming “On Courage” by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer; and “Be a Refusenik!” by Izabella Tabarovsky — arrive at a moment of protest fatigue and political polarization.
Only Tabarovsky’s book is aimed squarely at a Jewish audience, offering advice for Jewish students on how to fight back against a wave of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The other two books are mainly about pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian movements. But taken together, the three reflect something like a Jewish conversation about identity, dissent, community and the uneasy work of standing apart.
If Alinsky offered a field manual, Beckerman is after something more elusive: the inner life of dissent.
“I’m not someone who is comfortable at protests or looking to rush to the front of the barricades,” he said in an interview. Instead, “How to Be a Dissident” grew out of what he calls a long-running curiosity about how people arrive at moral decisions — “what happens in someone’s gut” when they decide to act. His previous book, “The Quiet Before,” was about how radical ideas become public social movements.
That curiosity, he suggests, is not incidental. The 49-year-old Beckerman, whose four grandparents survived the Holocaust, described growing up with a sense of how quickly societies can turn.
“They seemed to be existing in environments where they felt fairly comfortable,” he said of his grandparents’ prewar lives, “and the notion that that could change so quickly was a kind of mystery.”
Beckerman explores those ruptures in a book that moves from the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza to Soviet Jewish refuseniks to Russian dissidents like Alexei Navalny. The book’s chapter titles distill their example and thought into directives: “Be Rational,” for example, describes how Spinoza applied the rigorous power of logical thinking to dispel superstition and annoy just about everybody.
The Soviet Jews who tried to hijack a plane in 1970 — and who played a large role in Beckerman’s first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone,” a history of the Soviet Jewry movement — are featured in the chapter “Be Loyal.” It’s about the strong........