In memoriam: Jonathan Schell, anti-war activist and visiting scholar

Jonathan Schell, a journalist, best-selling author, and anti-war activist who taught several courses at Yale, died on March 25 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 70 years old.

Schell was author of the acclaimed books “The Village of Ben Such,” about the Vietnam War, and “The Fate of the Earth,” about the Cold War, among many others. He was a research scholar at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and in the Program of Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2010 to 2013. He was also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2005. At Yale, Schell taught two courses: “Strategic, Political, and Moral Dilemmas of the Nuclear Age” and “Nonviolence and Political Power in the 20th Century.”

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Jonathan Schell,” said Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center. “He was widely admired and greatly respected by students and colleagues alike over his many years at Yale. He will be missed.”

Read Schell’s obituary in The New York Times.