To the ear of Americans educated on college campuses where African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, women, Jews, and gays have their own academic studies programs, dormitories, student centers, and advocacy groups, the notion that “identity” needs defending may seem quaint, a relic of the melting pot era. Identity politics need not to be defended, but to be reined in, goes this view, which is reinforced not only by Balkanized college campuses, but by the violence between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites.

But a different view is held by Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as the Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Sharansky before moving to Israel and embarking on a political career that eventually elevated him to the post of deputy premier. In a new book, “Defending Identity” (Perseus, 288 pages, $26.95), Mr. Sharansky reports that his own experience and his reading of American history convince him that, as he puts it, “far from being the hostile enemy of democracy, identity is in fact necessary to sustain it.”

Mr. Sharansky writes that although identity can be “used destructively,” it is also “a crucial force for good.” Strong identities, he says, “are as valuable to a well-functioning society as they are to secure and committed well-functioning individuals. Just as the advance of democracy is critical to securing international peace and stability, so too is cultivating strong identities.”

The most compelling proof in Mr. Sharansky’s account is his own life story. “Identity gave me the strength to become free,” he writes. “When Jews abandon identity in the pursuit of universal freedom, they end up with neither. Yet when they embrace identity in the name of freedom, as Soviet Jews did in the 1970s, they end up securing both.”

This testimony is in a sense incontrovertible. Who knows better than Mr. Sharansky what gave him the strength to endure under the pressure of KGB interrogations and the miserable conditions of the Gulag? Yet it also underscores the difficulty of the argument Mr. Sharansky has to make. For it wasn’t “identity” in the abstract, as he tells the story, that allowed him to withstand pressure to recant or confess. It was his particular identity — a connection to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel, a book of Psalms, and a fear of God.

Yet this book is “Defending Identity,” not “Defending Judaism,” so, a bit ironically for a defense of identity, Mr. Sharansky does his best to universalize his argument. He writes of his prison friendship with a Pentecostal Christian whose faith plays a similar role to Sharansky’s Judaism in supporting the prisoner against the Soviet authorities. He writes of the role of identity groups within the Soviet Union in working with the Helsinki Watch group against the Communist regime: “The first to join were the Ukrainians, then the Lithuanians and Georgians. Next were the Catholics, Pentecostals, Crimean Tatars.”

As for the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Mr. Sharansky credits it with delivering “the decisive blow to the Soviet regime.” Mr. Sharansky also briefly makes the case that the American Revolution “was born out of American religious tradition and identity no less than out of political traditions of democracy and Enlightenment.”

Mr. Sharansky is particularly sharp in his analysis of peace groups and what he calls the “post-identity” movement, whose credo he encapsulates as: “Identity causes war; war is evil; therefore, identity causes evil.” Mr. Sharansky rejects this logic, and is skeptical of antiwar movements generally. “From the outset, the peace movement was a weapon in the hands of the Soviet Union,” he writes, worrying that “a negative side effect of the good life available in democratic societies is that it can often weaken the very strength to fight for it.”

Some of the liveliest and most illuminating sections of the book are anecdotes of Mr. Sharansky’s meetings. He tells of one session in Paris in 2003 at which he was told by France’s Jewish intellectuals, “The battle is not between Islam and the West. It is between civilized Europe and the United States.” Mr. Sharansky rejects the idea that these sentiments are caused by President Bush or the Iraq War, citing examples of similar views being expressed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Mr. Sharansky also reports on a meeting he had with the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Edward Egan, in which he asked for the cardinal’s help in supporting Israel’s decision to prevent the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth from being overshadowed by the largest and tallest mosque in the Middle East. The cardinal replied, according to Mr. Sharansky, that Israel should protect the church. But he declined to support Israel publicly, explaining, “I hear from the Catholic street that there are many who believe the whole incident is a Jewish provocation from the start.” Mr. Sharansky’s stunned retort was that “this report from your street that Jews are the problem is something we have heard for the last two thousand years.”

One appreciates Mr. Sharansky’s flashes of humor. Of tension between Jews and evangelical Christian supporters of Israel, he writes that the dispute can be resolved when the Messiah comes, by simply asking “whether he has been here before.”

In the end, though, the most valuable contribution of this valuable book is its assessment of the risks to Israel of a weakening Jewish identity. He quotes a Palestinian Arab terrorist as telling an Israeli journalist that the moment he was convinced Israel would be destroyed was when he saw an Israeli prison guard eating bread on Passover. The guard explained to the prisoner, “I feel no obligation to events that took place over 2000 years ago,” and the prisoner determined “to fight for everything…because opposing us is a nation that has no connection to its roots.”

Mr. Sharansky quotes an Israeli politician who served as education minister, Shulamit Aloni, opposing trips by Israeli schoolchildren to Auschwitz on the grounds that “they stirred up nationalist sentiment among the youth.” He reports on the current defense minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, who as prime minister, by Mr. Sharansky’s account, offered to divide Jerusalem and “was ready to give to Yasser Arafat everything he thought was important to Arafat: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Temple Mount, and special arrangements would be made for Jews to be bussed to the Western Wall.”

With Prime Minister Olmert facing a bribery scandal, Mr. Barak is being talked about yet again as a prime minister. America is itself on the verge of choosing a new president. Mr. Sharansky’s last book, “The Case for Democracy,” was famously endorsed by Mr. Bush, who gave Mr. Sharansky the Medal of Freedom. If the next American president reads this latest book by Mr. Sharansky on the interplay between identity, democracy, and freedom, it could be more important than any CIA or State Department briefing in understanding the foreign policy horizon.

istoll@nysun.com