Episodes

  • Maryna Shevtsova, "Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices" (Lexington Books, 2024)

    Maryna Shevtsova, "Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices" (Lexington Books, 2024)
    Jun 30 2024
    Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices came out with Lexington Books at the two-year’s mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2024. This volume undertakes an exploration of how gender norms have been transgressed and cultural expectations of womanhood and manhood evolved within the context of the war in Ukraine, ongoing since 2014. Edited by Maryna Shevtsova, it gives voice to feminist scholars and practitioners from Ukraine and the wider Central and Eastern European region who share their perspectives on the complex interconnection between gender and warfare. Table of contents is available here. Maryna Shevtsova is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    46 mins
  • Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, "The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

    Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, "The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)
    Jun 28 2024
    Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity. The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire. Michoel Rotenfeld has translated Goldenshteyn’s autobiography into English and provided an extensive introduction and helpful notes throughout the text. Rotenfeld’s translation, The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea, was published in 2023 by Touro University Press. Michoel Rotenfeld is a historical researcher and the associate director of Touro University Libraries. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Nicolas Véron, "Europe's Banking Union at Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative" (Bruegel, 2024)

    Nicolas Véron, "Europe's Banking Union at Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative" (Bruegel, 2024)
    Jun 28 2024
    In 2012, to stave off the collapse of their currency union, Europe’s leaders sought to end the so-called “doom loop” between the solvency of their governments and their banking systems. Two years later, a banking union was born. Created as a crisis response, like the postwar coal and steel community, this ten-year-old union is another step in Europe’s long integrationist road. Yet – as Nicolas Véron points out in Europe’s Banking Union At Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative (Bruegel, 2024) - the effort to "break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns remains fragile and incomplete". Together with Jean Pisani-Ferry, Nicolas Véron is a co-founder of the Bruegel public-policy think tank in Brussels and a scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in Washington. A specialist in financial systems and regulatory reform, he is an alumnus of the École Polytechnique and the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and - until 2000 - was a French civil servant. He has written and co-written many papers on banking supervision, crisis management, and Eurozone policy governance. *The author's book recommendations were Central Banking Before 1800: A Rehabilitation by Ulrich Bindseil (OUP, 2020) and 7500 Euros: Pastiches politico-littéraires by David Spector (Wombat, 2022). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    43 mins
  • Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, "The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, "The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Jun 22 2024
    In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    54 mins
  • William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

    William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
    Jun 19 2024
    Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 35 mins
  • Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

    Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
    Jun 15 2024
    Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using lessons. Here, what are denoted as borderline historical events, demonstrating both time-specific and time-transcending qualities, are suggested as useful materials. Scholarly works on the Holocaust and Soviet terror, from Raul Hilberg's and Robert Conquest's classic works of the 1960s to more recent books by Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, are analyzed to identify lessons of history, and their change during a full half-century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 13 mins
  • David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019)

    David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019)
    Jun 7 2024
    Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as the Wehrmacht's first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942 (FSG, 2019), David Stahel argues that it was in fact their first strategic success in the east. The mismanaged Soviet Counteroffensive became a phyrric victory as both sides struggled with strategic leadership and supply. German generals, caught between Stalin's hammer and Hitler's anvil, found loopholes in increasingly irrational orders to hold at all costs. Drawing on official war diaries, journals, memoirs, and correspondence, Stahel's latest installment in his reevaluation of the eastern front delivers a vivid account that challenges what you thought you knew about the war in the Soviet Union. David Stahel is the author of five previous books on Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union. He completed an MA in war studies at King's College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. His research primarily concentrates on the German military in World War II. Dr. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 15 mins
  • Gizem Zencirci, "The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2024)

    Gizem Zencirci, "The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
    Jun 7 2024
    Since coming to power in 2002, Turkey’s governing party, the AKP, has made poverty relief a central part of their political program. In addition to neoliberal reforms, AKP’s program has involved an emphasis on Islamic charity that is unprecedented in the history of the Turkish Republic. To understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, Zencirci introduces the concept of the Muslim Social, defined as a welfare regime that reimagined and reconfigured Islamic charitable practices to address the complex needs of a modern market society. In The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey (Syracuse UP, 2024), Zencirci explores the blending of religious values and neoliberal elements in dynamic, flexible, and unexpected ways. Although these governmental assemblages of Islamic neoliberalism produced new forms of generosity, distinctive notions of poverty, and novel ways of relating to others in society, Zencirci reveals how this welfare regime privileged managerial efficiency and emotional well-being at the expense of other objectives such as equality, development, or justice. The book provides a lens onto the everyday life of Islamic neoliberalism, while also mapping the kind of political concerns that animate poverty governance in our capitalist present. Gizem Zencirci is an associate professor of political science at Providence College. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Cultural Economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
    Show more Show less
    32 mins