Written by guest writer Luke Levine, Head of Community Life @ KeshetUK
There are times in history when a community is not only facing illness, but judgement. When fear spreads faster than facts. When silence from institutions feels almost as dangerous as the disease itself.
Joseph Sonnabend stepped into one of those moments and chose to act.
Born in 1933 in South Africa to Jewish European immigrants, Sonnabend trained as a physician and immunologist before settling in New York. In the early 1980s, as a new and terrifying illness began to emerge among gay men, he was one of the first doctors willing to treat those affected without hesitation or moral judgement.
At a time when AIDS was poorly understood and widely stigmatised, Sonnabend approached it as what it was: a public health crisis. Long before HIV was formally identified, he argued that the syndrome was likely caused by a transmissible infectious agent. He began promoting practical, evidence-based safer-sex guidance rooted in harm reduction. That clarity, grounded in science rather than fear, saved lives. His work did not stop at the clinic door.
During the height of the epidemic, Sonnabend helped co-found the AIDS Medical Foundation, which later became amfAR. He also helped establish the Community Research Initiative, pioneering community-based HIV research, and the PWA Health Group, the first and largest formally recognised HIV treatment buyers’ club. These were not symbolic gestures. They were infrastructure — practical responses to a system that was failing people.
Sonnabend believed that those living with AIDS should not be passive recipients of care, but active participants in research and treatment decisions. That patient-centred approach helped reshape HIV medicine and influenced prevention and treatment strategies internationally, including in the UK.
As a Jewish doctor working during a time when gay men were being vilified and abandoned, Sonnabend understood the danger of scapegoating. He understood what happens when a society decides some lives are disposable. His response was steady, clinical, and deeply principled. He insisted that medicine must be guided by evidence and by dignity.
The early years of the AIDS crisis were marked by extraordinary loss. But they were also marked by extraordinary courage — from patients, activists, and clinicians who refused to accept indifference.
Joseph Sonnabend was one of those clinicians.
Today, HIV is a manageable condition for many. Prevention tools are sophisticated. Treatment is effective. That progress was built by people who acted early and refused to let stigma define science. Sonnabend’s legacy is not only in the institutions he helped build or the research he advanced. It is in the standard he set that public health must centre those most at risk, and that compassion and rigour belong in the same sentence. In remembering him, we honour a Jewish physician who responded to crisis with responsibility, clarity, and care, and who helped change the course of a global epidemic.
