A recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Natan Sharansky spent almost a decade in a Siberian labor camp before escaping to Israel, where he served as a senior minister in Israel’s government, now heading the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem. In Defending Identity, Sharansky argues that renouncing identity as a kind of prejudice is dangerous to a democratic society, and that those with strong national, religious, ethnic, or tribal identities are better equipped to handle challenges and defend principles in a volatile modern world.