Joshua Rubenstein is an American activist, writer and scholar of literature, dissent, and politics in the former Soviet Union.
[4] During college, Rubenstein took a six-week language tour of the Soviet Union and met William Brui, an artist in Leningrad whom he would eventually profile in ARTnews, resulting in his hiring by the Boston Phoenix.
[3] He joined Amnesty International in 1975 and served as its Northeast Regional Director for 37 years.
He worked with Soviet dissidents and on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and organized campaigns to free activists in Pakistan, the former Rhodesia, and Ecuador.
[4][6] As a writer, Rubenstein has published eight books covering Soviet dissidents,[7][8][9] Joseph Stalin's purges on Jewish intellectual leaders,[10] and biographies of Ilya Ehrenburg and Leon Trotsky.