By Marcy Oster

(JTA) – Robert Bernstein, a founder of Human Rights Watch who later distanced himself from the group over its criticism of Israel, died May 27 in Manhattan. He was 96.

Bernstein also headed Random House for nearly 25 years, emerging as a leading figure in the publishing world. Among many top authors of the day, his company also published the works of Soviet dissidents Natan Sharansky, Andrei Sakharov, and Yelena Bonner, as well as Jewish Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman.

Bernstein was the founding chairman of Human Rights Watch, founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, serving until 1990. In 2009, Bernstein publicly criticized the NGO’s reporting on human rights in Israel, writing in an op-ed in The New York Times that it condemned “far more” human rights abuses in Israel than in other Middle Eastern countries ruled by “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records.”

Gerald Steinberg, the president of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, described him as “a brave defender of human rights.” On his willingness to criticize Human Rights Watch over Israel, Steinberg said of Bernstein, “he understood that it was attempting to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

Bernstein’s memoir, Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights, was published in 2016.