Too often, we wait for someone to die to celebrate their achievements. When it comes to the human rights movement, many important voices are never celebrated at all. So it was inspiring to see Joshua Rubenstein honored last week at the Armenian Heritage Foundation’s annual human rights lecture.

For 37 years, Rubenstein has worked tirelessly on behalf of prisoners of conscience. He smuggled documents out of the former Soviet Union to record the plight of Jewish dissidents — risky work that set him on the path of writing scholarly books.