The texts by the intellectual, activist of the Ukrainian Jewish movement, and Soviet dissident Joseph Zissels contained in this book are mainly speeches, presentations at conferences and seminars, supplemented by interviews for television and radio. The topics range from dissidence to the problem of identity, civil society, Polish-Ukrainian relations, and the Russian-Ukrainian war. The last dates of publication are 2006 and 2019. In fact, the only interview in 2019, which Zissels gave to Ostap Drozdov in connection with a public letter from the First of December group, of which Zissels is a representative, in support of President Petro Poroshenko, is perhaps the most revealing in terms of the fundamental absence of ‘hate speech’ that characterizes all of Zissels’s texts without exception. No matter how provocative and sharp, sometimes downright rude, the journalist’s questions are, the interlocutor takes the blow with dignity, remaining unmoved.”

—Dr Olesia Naidiuk, Press Secretary of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine, Kyiv