Bari Weiss with Natan Sharansky | FP in Israel

On January 25, 2024, Bari Weiss interviewed Natan Sharansky at the Nalagaat Theatre in Jaffa, Israel.

Natan was born in Ukraine, in 1948, the same year as the birth of the state of Israel. A chess prodigy and a mathematician, he became a figure of international importance in 1977, when he was imprisoned by the Soviet Union on trumped-up charges of treason. His real crime was wanting to immigrate to the state of Israel. At his court hearing in 1978, he famously said, “To the court, I have nothing to say. To my wife and to my people, I say, Next year in Jerusalem.”

Getting to Jerusalem took him longer than a year. Sharansky had to spend nine years in the gulag, often in solitary confinement. In 1983, he was in a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border when he learned that President Reagan had labeled the Soviet Union an evil empire. That empire fell eight years later, in no small part thanks to the actions of Sharansky, who immigrated to Israel upon his release from prison in 1986 and reunited with his wife, Avital.

Natan went on to a long political career, serving as a cabinet minister in every Israeli government from 1996 to 2005. He’s the author of several books, including the must-read memoir “Fear No Evil,” and most recently, “Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People.” In the course of his remarkable life, Natan has been a key actor in the only true forever war, and that is the war of liberty versus tyranny.

And while many American Jews have had the luxury over the past half-century of feeling as though history had ended, or that they had been on a holiday from it, Sharansky has always lived inside Jewish history. Few people can better illuminate the way, not just for Jews and not just for Israelis, but for anyone who cares about the cause of freedom than Natan Sharansky.