Suzanne Nossel - Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All

I COULD NOT HAVE COMPLETED THIS PROJECT WITHOUT THE HELP AND SUPPORT of coworkers, family, and friends. I am grateful to my colleagues at PEN America for helping to navigate and illuminate the rocky landscape of free speech at a time of rising threats. Summer Lopez, Tom Melia, Nora Benavidez, James Tager, Stephen Fee, Polina Kovaleva, Karin Karlekar, and Viktorya Vilk have helped me time and again to puzzle through difficult questions. Katie Zanecchia, Rebecca Werner, Praise Apampa, Michelle Franke, Stephen Fee, Chip Rolley, Shawnna Jannah, Madison Gonzalez, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, Deborah Wilson, Julie Trebault, and many others have been unfailingly supportive and enthusiastic through the contortions required to get this book done. Jonathan Friedman provided invaluable comments on the manuscript, drawing from his excellent work leading our campus speech program since 2018. PEN America COO Dru Menaker filled in for me during a month of book leave and is a heroic and treasured intellectual and professional partner. If the expertise, dedication, and passion of the PEN America staff is any indication, free speech has a bright future. I am also grateful to former colleagues, including PEN America alumni, partners in the human rights field, and coworkers at the U.S. State Department and elsewhere who have been valued collaborators on the issues addressed in this book.

Deepest thanks go to the PEN America Board of Trustees, Executive Committee, and especially President Jennifer Egan, for their unflagging support for this project, including reading through the manuscript. Michael Pietsch has been a very patient, thoughtful adviser on all things book publishing.

My work on this book was enabled by exceptional assistance with research. Rumur Dowling is brilliant, diligent, meticulous, and indefatigable. Despite meeting only once in person, we worked together seamlessly and his contributions to this book were boundless. Paul Barker provided superb, highly detailed, well-informed, and imaginative assistance with the legal chapters of the book.

I am extremely grateful to Floyd Abrams, Geoffrey Stone, Nadine Strossen, Evelyn Aswad, and Adeline Lee for providing expert, detailed, and thoughtful comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to Eileen Donahoe, David Kaye, Dan Mogulof, John Witt, and Nicholas Christakis for their careful review of sections of the narrative. David Grann, Kyra Darnton, Joel Simon, and Dan Gerstein were unfailingly helpful with guidance and suggestions for research, writing, and presenting my ideas. Thanks to Michael Massing, James Traub, Dahlia Lithwick, and Matt Connelly for their insights. Some of the ideas of this book grew out of pieces published in the Washington Post , the New York Times , and Foreign Policy. I am grateful to editors, including Fred Hiatt, Adam Kushner, Clay Risen, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Cameron Abadi, and their teams.

My agents, Larry Weissman and Sascha Alper, provided encouragement, incisive observations, and unflagging support throughout this project. During our first meeting my editor Alessandra Bastagli casually offered up a suggested structure for the book that turned it from a formless morass of examples and arguments into a coherent concept that I could actually imagine writing. She has been kind, generous, forgiving, and deeply committed throughout the process, driving things forward with determination and good cheer. The entire team at HarperCollins/Dey Street, including Rosy Tahan, Tatiana Dubin, Heidi Richter, Kendra Newton, and Julie Paulauski, has brought energy and creativity to making the book all it could be.

Finally, thanks go to my family. We are very fortunate to have a wonderful, close extended family, including in-laws Bob and Maida Greenberg; Jonathan Greenberg; Megan Blumenreich; Hank Greenberg; Maggie Greenberg; Judith Greenberg; Ira Joseph; Claire Joseph; and Sasha Joseph as well as my sister, Ilana Nossel; Jordan Kolar; Noam, Ori, and Edan Kolar; and my brother, Deon Nossel. My mother, Renee Nossel, is the anchor of our family whose love and support have undergirded me my entire life. Working away in the evenings in his study at home, my late father, Hymie Nossel, provided a role model of exceptional professional discipline combined with infectious zeal for his work, which has guided me always and which I thought of often during the trying moments of writing and editing.

Finally, greatest thanks go to Leo and Liza Greenberg and David Greenberg. David has been a clear-eyed, insightful thought partner throughout my work in the field of free expression and has provided endless rounds of editing and polishing, making nearly every page and paragraph better. Our familys dinner-table talks, car and subway conversations, world travels, debate preparations, historical explorations, and never-ending dialogues on everything contributed to this book more than any other source. You are my lifes greatest inspiration, comfort, and love.

SUZANNE NOSSEL is the CEO of PEN America, the foremost organization working to protect and advance human rights, free expression, and literature. She has also served as the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch and as executive director of Amnesty International USA and held senior State Department positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Nossel frequently writes op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications, as well as a regular column for Foreign Policy magazine. She lives in New York City.

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AFTER GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE IN THE 1990S, I SPENT TWO YEARS IN Johannesburg, South Africa, taking part in efforts to curb deadly political violence during that countrys transition from apartheid to democracy. The work involved going to townships to facilitate local peace committees comprising political activists, labor leaders, corporate executives, police, and armed forces seeking ways to forestall violent conflict. This experiencemonitoring demonstrations and mediating conflictsremains the most indelible of my professional life. My colleagues and interlocutors there were among the most dedicated, inspiring, and courageous people I have encountered anywhere. Working at the front lines of community conflict, I gained appreciation for the power of dialogue to bridge divisions, for peaceful protest to force change, and for ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality to inspire. Years later I entered government to represent the United States at the United Nations, helping to forge a global deal to settle the United States swelling arrearage to the worldwide body. Here my role involved finding common ground across political and ideological schisms, among delegations from nearly two hundred countries. From there I entered the media world, seeing firsthand how essential creative expression and press freedom are to our economy and national identity.