How to Be a Dissident, Lessons from Resistance Then and Now

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. What does courage demand when freedom is threatened? This week on Writer’s Voice, two conversations ask one of the hardest questions any of us can face. What does it really mean to resist? First, journalist Gal Beckerman joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his book How to Be a Dissident. Drawing on figures from Hannah Arendt to Alexei Navalny, Osip Mandelstam and Etty Hillesum, he argues that dissidents aren’t superheroes. They’re ordinary people who decide they can no longer live with inaction. “I really have come to understand those choices as not only burdensome, but actually the substance from which a real meaningful life is made.” Then Writer’s Voice revisits a conversation with novelist Buzzy Jackson about To Die Beautiful, her novel inspired by Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft. Through Schaft’s story, Jackson explores how ordinary people become extraordinary when injustice closes in, and why even for any of us, small acts of courage matter. “I really started to understand that a refugee crisis in a country is a little bit of like a canary in a coal mine.” Two conversations, one enduring question. How do we prepare ourselves to choose courage when the moment arrives? Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast. Tags: How to Be a Dissident, Gal Beckerman interview, Writer’s Voice podcast, Hannie Schaft, To Die Beautiful, Dutch Resistance, World War II resistance, Alexei Navalny, Hannah Arendt, Osip Mandelstam, Etty Hillesum, Buzzy Jackson interview, You might also like: Buzzy Jackson, TO DIE BEAUTIFUL, Robert Matzen, DUTCH GIRL Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show! Gal Beckerman, How to Be a Dissident Gal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident begins with a question that many Americans are asking themselves today: What would I actually do if confronted with injustice? That question came to him in a recurring dream in which he faced an interrogator and had to decide whether to compromise or stand by his principles. The dream became the starting point for an exploration of the people throughout history who refused to surrender their moral agency. Rather than treating dissidents as extraordinary heroes, Beckerman argues that they are ordinary people who develop habits of conscience long before history demands them. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s reflections on those who resisted Nazism, he suggests that the defining question is not ideological but deeply personal: “Can I live with myself?” That question links the lives of very different people across time and political systems. The conversation explores Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who refused to deny a poem criticizing Stalin, even though it led to imprisonment and ultimately death in a labor camp. Beckerman discusses why truth telling became inseparable from Mandelstam’s identity as a poet, and how his wife preserved his work entirely through memory. Beckerman also reflects on Alexei Navalny’s decision to return to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt. Navalny understood the likely consequences, yet believed he could not abandon the people whose freedom he defended. The discussion explores courage, martyrdom, humor as resistance, and the difficult relationship between hope and sacrifice. One of the book’s most provocative ideas is Beckerman’s defense of what he calls “hopeful pessimism.” Rather than assuming history inevitably bends toward justice, he argues that recognizing the possibility of failure creates urgency and invites action. He illustrates this through the writings of Dutch Jewish diarist Etty Hillesum, whose remarkable spiritual outlook during the Holocaust demonstrated that dignity and compassion could survive even under the worst imaginable circumstances. The interview concludes by exploring loyalty, community, protest, and the importance of creating spaces where people see one another publicly living according to shared values, such as neighborhood networks and No Kings demonstrations, and why the value of protest often lies less in immediate political victories than in helping people develop the habits of citizenship that sustain democracy over time. Ultimately, he argues that meaningful lives are built through countless moral choices, each one another brushstroke in the portrait of who we become. READ THE TRANSCRIPT Buzzy Jackson, TO DIE BEAUTIFUL Writer’s Voice revisits a conversation with novelist Buzzy Jackson about To Die Beautiful, inspired by the life of Hannie Schaft, one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated resistance fighters during World War II. Jackson begins by introducing Hannie as an ambitious nineteen-year-old law student whose dream was to become an international human rights lawyer. Quiet, studious, and protected by her parents after the death of her older sister, she seemed an unlikely resistance fighter. Yet the German occupation gradually transformed both her world and her sense of responsibility. The interview explores Hannie’s friendship with two Jewish classmates, Sonia Frank and Phileen Polak, and how the slow tightening of anti-Jewish persecution forced ordinary Dutch citizens to confront impossible moral choices. Jackson describes fascism not as something that arrives all at once, but as a gradual erosion of everyday life until injustice becomes impossible to ignore. Jackson also reflects on her own research into resistance, noting that many Dutch resistance fighters began simply by helping refugees and people in danger. She draws connections between those historical experiences and contemporary debates about refugees, human rights, and civic responsibility, arguing that humanitarian crises often warn of broader threats to democracy. Finally, the discussion turns to the difficult moral landscape of occupied Holland. Jackson distinguishes committed collaborators, active resistance fighters, and the far larger number of ordinary citizens who occupied the space between them. She emphasizes that even modest acts of solidarity, refusing to report a hidden neighbor, quietly supplying ration cards, or publicly standing against injustice, can have profound consequences. Writing the novel ultimately inspired her own civic engagement, reinforcing her belief that meaningful resistance begins with ordinary people deciding to act. READ THE TRANSCRIPT