Benjamin Nathans ’79 Wins Pulitzer
Benjamin Nathans ’79, a professor of history at University of Pennsylvania, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction on Monday. The award recognized Nathans’ latest work, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which explores dissent in the Soviet Union from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism.
Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term professor of history at Penn and teaches imperial Russian and Soviet history, modern Jewish history, and the history of human rights. His book was described by The Pulitzer committee as “prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent,” adding that it is “populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.”
Nathans is also the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. He is co-editor of Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe and From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages. After graduating from Park, Nathans went on to earn his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
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