2 days ago • Aug 22, 2026
On Courage: How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
In On Courage, former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer offers a deeply reported manual for how ordinary people defy authoritarianism. Written with Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and built on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across five continents, the book expands their acclaimed New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” into a practical case that even under repressive conditions, each of us holds power to help defeat autocrats — at a moment when nearly three out of four people on earth live under authoritarian rule, the highest rate since the late 1970s.
Fields-Meyer joins Rabbi Sharon Brous to discuss the people at the heart of the book — a Hong Kong student who risked everything for democracy, a Caracas mother who broke with the movement that raised her, Americans who faced serious risk for dissenting in their own workplaces — and what our tradition asks of us as the walls of history close in.
By: Rabbi Sharon Brous and Ami Fields-Meyer
