1949–
American historian and publisher who documented Stalin's last conspiracy
'There should be a major film, and it should be called Gulag. This is the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.'
American publisher and historian who founded the Annals of Communism series at Yale University Press in 1991, bringing newly opened Soviet archives to Western readers for the first time. His 2003 book Stalin's Last Crime, co-authored with Vladimir Naumov, drew on previously closed KGB and presidential archives to reconstruct the Doctors' Plot and argue that Stalin was planning a mass deportation of Soviet Jews and a new wave of terror on the eve of his death. Since 2009 he has served as executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, leading efforts to preserve Eastern European Jewish heritage.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1981–1991Editor-in-Chief and Director, Northwestern University Press
- 1981Founded the literary journal Formations
- 1991–2009Editorial Director and Associate Director, Yale University Press; founded Annals of Communism series
- 2003Published Stalin's Last Crime (with Vladimir Naumov)
- 2004–Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature, Bard College
- 2008Published Inside the Stalin Archives
- 2009–CEO and Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Related historical events
YIVO directorship and the Vilna digitization project
In 2009 the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, based in New York, named Jonathan Brent its executive director and CEO, and he has led the institute's work to preserve Eastern European Jewish heritage. In 2014, with the cooperation of the government of the Republic of Lithuania, he established the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project. The project set out to preserve and digitize roughly 2.5 million documents and about 12,200 books, spanning 500 years of Jewish history in Eastern Europe and Russia, and to make them publicly accessible online. Its driving purpose was to open the Vilna YIVO archives to scholars and general readers worldwide. In 2019 Brent received the Cross of the Knight of the Order of Merits to Lithuania in recognition of his promotion of cooperation between Lithuania and YIVO and of the preservation of pre-war Jewish archives in Lithuania. Since 2004 he had also taught as the visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College, combining his experience as a publisher and historian with the direction of the institute.