There could hard­ly be a time­li­er book than this exam­i­na­tion of social con­science by the author of When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Strug­gle to Save Sovi­et Jew­ry, recip­i­ent of pres­ti­gious awards and named a best book of the year by the New York­er. Gal Beckerman’s How to be a Dis­si­dent begins with the author’s rec­ol­lec­tion of a dream in which he found him­self in a cell, threat­ened by an inter­roga­tor to iden­ti­fy his col­lab­o­ra­tors. Beck­er­man writes that he woke with an uneasy sense of shame, not know­ing with cer­tain­ty what choice he would make. This stirred an hon­est self-reck­on­ing: ​“The inces­sant ask­ing of this ques­tion—Can I live with myself?—is what makes a dis­si­dent a dis­si­dent. Being a dis­si­dent means try­ing to close the dis­tance between what you believe and how you act. It means under­stand­ing the con­di­tions that allow you to be your­self and not accept­ing any vio­la­tion of them.” Beck­er­man doesn’t shy from the fact that the odds are daunt­ing, giv­en that over sev­en­ty per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion now live under authoritarianism. 

Beck­er­man invokes Baruch Spin­oza as the quin­tes­sen­tial arche­type of the mod­ern dis­si­dent, trac­ing his seis­mic impact to the lived expe­ri­ence and stir­ring epipha­nies of dis­si­dent writ­ers such as Etty Hille­sum, Alek­sander Solzhen­it­syn, Albert Camus, J. M. Coet­zee, Milan Kun­dera, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He recounts hero­ic forms of moral wit­ness­ing and vig­i­lance, per­haps most notably the actions of the team of Jew­ish jour­nal­ists and intel­lec­tu­als led by Emanuel Ringel­blum in the War­saw Ghetto,which cul­mi­nat­ed in the extra­or­di­nary col­lec­tion of his­tor­i­cal wit­ness­ing known as the Oyneg Shabes archive (his grand­par­ents met in the same ghet­to). Beck­er­man encour­ages us to see a direct con­nec­tion between such hero­ism and the con­tem­po­rary actions of indi­vid­u­als who wit­ness the vio­lent actions of ICE or police and pull out their cell­phones: ​“I’m here and I’m going to cap­ture this, because it might be use­ful to some­one one day.” Yet he cau­tions that the lone ​“dis­si­dent is always wait­ing for the reas­sur­ing sound of oth­er peo­ple, for the bol­ster­ing echoes.” Accord­ing­ly, he reveres Han­nah Arendt’s insight: ​“pow­er is not a thing one holds but a cur­rent that flows between peo­ple when they act together.” 

Despite his grim sub­ject mat­ter, Beckerman’s iri­des­cent prose cap­ti­vates, and he sage­ly aligns his­tor­i­cal episodes to our present sense of emer­gency (he is par­tic­u­lar­ly good on near­ly for­got­ten episodes such as the thwart­ed Sovi­et Jew­ish refusenik plane hijack­ers in 1970 or the more effec­tive 1963 ​“Children’s Cru­sade” in Birm­ing­ham) as well as the salu­tary effects of trans­gres­sive humor. Irrev­er­ence he reminds us, such as ​“the pitch-black humor of Sovi­et dis­si­dents,” is as much about defang­ing an oppres­sor as it is about mak­ing dis­si­dents them­selves feel a lit­tle less scared.” Through­out, he writes with pas­sion­ate lucid­i­ty and prophet­ic fire.

Beckerman’s most far-reach­ing claim is that dis­si­dence is not even real­ly a ​“choice,” but rather a stub­born way of being. Many of us might con­ceive of the icon­ic dis­si­dents of his­to­ry as larg­er than life, but not so for Beck­er­man: ​“The dis­si­dents I’ve come to know are endear­ing (and also cru­cial) to me because [… ] they are human-sized obsta­cles to the flat­ten­ing forces of our world, whether polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy or reli­gious ortho­doxy or the dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies that increas­ing­ly ren­der us pre­dictable and manip­u­la­ble.” Beckerman’s for­tu­nate read­ers will like­ly emerge feel­ing far less lone­ly and impo­tent. With chap­ter titles that serve as urgent moral sign­posts (“Be Pes­simistic,” ​“Be Watch­ful,” ​“Be Pre­sump­tu­ous,” etc.), this is the kind of work that should be wide­ly read and hope­ful­ly stir more of us to speak and act on behalf of oth­ers in our time of grow­ing peril.