Joshua Rubenstein was on the staff of Amnesty International USA from 1975 to 2012 as the Northeast Regional Director. His responsibilities were wide-ranging. He was involved in organizing chapters of volunteer activists in New England, as well as through the Midwest and South. He represented Amnesty to the press, organized public forums, and sustained ties with numerous other human rights organizations throughout New England, New York, and New Jersey. He testified against the death penalty before state legislatures and conducted seminars on various human rights topics with college and community audiences. Based on his experience as an organizer and his foreign language skills, he was also recruited by Amnesty’s International Secretariat to help organize Amnesty’s grassroots membership in Israel and in the Russian Federation, as well as serving as a delegate to international gatherings in Canada, Mexico, Austria, and Uzbekistan.
Mr. Rubenstein became Associate Director for Major Gifts at the Harvard Law School in March 2015.
Working as an independent scholar, Mr. Rubenstein has been an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University since 1984, and is the author or editor of a number of path-breaking books on Soviet and Soviet-Jewish history. Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights, was the first comprehensive history of the Soviet human rights movement. Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, a biography of the controversial Soviet-Jewish writer and journalist, was the result of thirteen years of research and writing. He is the co-editor of Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Mr. Rubenstein received a National Jewish Book Award in the category of East European Studies for Stalin's Secret Pogrom. He is also the co-editor of The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. He also helped to edit and translate The Unknown Black Book, the Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories.
Mr. Rubenstein contributed a concise, interpretive biography of Leon Trotsky to the Jewish Lives series of Yale University Press. The Jewish Lives series received a National Jewish Book Award as the 2014 Jewish Book of the Year, the first time that a series has been recognized in this way.
Mr. Rubenstein wrote and edited Shot by Shot: the Holocaust in German-Occupied Territory. It has been published as an ebook by Facing History and Ourselves, where Mr. Rubenstein served as Scholar-in- Residence in 2012 and 2013.
His most recent book, The Last Days of Stalin, was published by Yale University Press in the spring of 2016. It has already appeared in Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, and Ukrainian, while additional foreign-language editions are awaited in Azeri, Czech, and French.