Episodios

  • Yitzhak Conforti, "Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

    Yitzhak Conforti, "Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
    May 23 2025
    What many people don’t realize is that Zionism is not a monolithic term. From its inception there were rigorous debates about the nature and direction of the movement? Thinkers had argued about some of the fundamental questions around Israel. Where would a future Jewish state be located? What language would they speak? Should Israel come about through a slow evolution or a radical revolution? In his book, Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement (Academic Studies Press, 2024), Yithak Conforti situates us in these debates, zeroing in on the leaders of what has become known as “cultural Zionism.” These group of thinkers stood across the aisle from more politically minded voices like Theodor Herzl. As Prof Yizhak Conforti explains, their approach was quite different, highlighting a more Jewish, more ethnic, more culturally centered Zionist vision. Zionism and Jewish Culture examines the history of Zionism from a new perspective, arguing that Zionism was not only a political project, but also a major cultural force in modern Jewish life. In exploring these topics, this book enables a deeper understanding of the forces that continue to shape Zionism and Israel today. Prof. Yitzhak Conforti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, specializing in modern Jewish history, Jewish nationalism, and Zionist historiography. In addition to Zionism and Jewish Culture, se is the author of several influential works, including Past Tense: Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the Zionist Memory and Shaping a Nation: The Cultural Origins of Zionism, 1882–1948. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) 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
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    56 m
  • Charles Hecker, "Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Charles Hecker, "Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    May 22 2025
    Today I interviewed Charles Hecker about Zero Sum. The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025). Hecker, a journalist and business consultant, speaks with dozens of Western business executives, bankers, and financiers who reaped immense profits for themselves and their companies in the Russian market, which suddenly opened to foreigners after decades of state planning and economic autarky. These “riskophile” Westerners recall the early post-Soviet Russia as an unchartered territory where business “had a body count” and “violence was cheap, routine and almost casual”. In the 2000s Russia, now stabilized by Putin, offered unparalleled opportunities for those who had learnt to navigate its murky, gray environment. While some expressed concern over the unchallenged primacy of the supreme ruler presiding over arbitrary redistribution of property in favor of his cronies and the rapid consolidation of state ownership, the squeamish were far outnumbered by the opportunistic. Following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent imposition of sweeping Western sanctions forced most Westerners to flee, often selling their companies for a fraction of their value and, in some cases, even giving it for free to their Russian partners. Looking back some regret “looking the other way” at the rampant corruption and lawlessness, while others admit that enrichment in Russia was always destined to be short-lived. 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
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Jan Borowicz, "Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders" (Routledge, 2024)

    Jan Borowicz, "Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders" (Routledge, 2024)
    May 21 2025
    Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian crisis by our border. And there is a tiny minority of local and non-local activists who sacrifice themselves and who give help to the people that are dying in the forests, especially during the wintertime. And there are people who live nearby and live day to day-by-day helping the helping the people crossing even and crossing the border and they're harassed and victims of police brutality. And then I had a very strange thought that now I can understand what happened during the during the war and during the Holocaust where exactly this where exactly this happened. And people who deal with Holocaust history and Holocaust memory had the same association, same analogy, that this is somehow and gruesomely very, very similar. And it struck me, the thought that now I understand because as if I was not entirely sure or not entirely certain if I believed it and in the first place. My book is about denial and disavowal. Knowing something and not knowing at the same time." – Jan Borowicz from the interview 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
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    1 h y 15 m
  • Richard Calis, "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Richard Calis, "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    May 19 2025
    In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe’s foremost source on Ottoman Greece. Yet as Richard Calis reveals, Crusius’s massive—and largely untapped—archive has much more to tell us about how early modern Europeans negotiated cultural and religious difference. In particular, Crusius’s work illuminates Western European views of the religious “other” within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign. Many Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Ottoman rule. Crusius’s records, however, reveal in exceptional detail how such stories developed. His interactions with his Greek Orthodox visitors, and with a vast network of correspondents, show that Greeks’ own narratives of hardship entwined in complex ways with Western Europeans’ orientalist views of the Ottoman world. They also reflect the religious tensions that undergirded these exchanges, fueled by Crusius’s fervent desire to spread Lutheran belief across Ottoman Greece and the wider world. A lively intellectual history drawn from a forgotten archive, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece (Harvard UP, 2025) is also a perceptive character study, in which Crusius takes his place in the history of ethnography, Lutheran reform, and European philhellenism. Richard Calis is an Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University, who specializes in the history of science and intellectual history Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. 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
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    1 h y 2 m
  • Júlia Király, "Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Troubles to Global Hurricane" (Springer, 2020)

    Júlia Király, "Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Troubles to Global Hurricane" (Springer, 2020)
    May 14 2025
    Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years. None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the Supreme Court, law enforcement, intelligence, and competition regulation but - to his great frustration - the Federal Reserve is holding out. It was the same story in Hungary after Viktor Orbán returned to the premiership in 2010. Bound by EU law and the mandates of the governor and his deputies, Orbán had to wait three years to break the national bank. One of those deputy governors, Júlia Király, experienced state capture from the inside and resigned with a public protest at the loss of institutional independence. Now an associate professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, she began her career under socialism at the statistics and planning offices. As deputy governor, she was part of the team that managed the Hungarian economy through the post-2007 financial crisis – an experience she chronicles in Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Turbulences to a Global Hurricane (Springer, 2020). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at www.242.news 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
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    47 m
  • Victoria Khiterer, "Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration" (Purdue UP, 2025)

    Victoria Khiterer, "Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration" (Purdue UP, 2025)
    May 13 2025
    Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation. After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal suffering of the Soviet people during the war. Police dispersed unauthorized commemoration meetings of Jewish activists at Babyn Yar. A monument “for one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of the war” was erected in Babyn Yar in 1976, but the Holocaust was not mentioned in its inscription. With the collapse of communism, state anti-Semitism ended. Holocaust commemoration became an important part of national memory politics in independent Ukraine. In the last few decades, over thirty monuments have been built at Babyn Yar, which are dedicated to the memory of Jews, Roma, members of the resistance movement, and other people executed there. However, heated debates continue about the commemoration of the Babyn Yar massacre. 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
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    1 h y 39 m
  • Paul R. Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovskiĭ-Shtern, "Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence" (U Toronto Press, 2018)

    Paul R. Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovskiĭ-Shtern, "Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
    May 12 2025
    There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them together. The story of Jews and Ukrainians is presented in an impartial manner through twelve thematic chapters. Among the themes discussed are geography, history, economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, literature and theater, architecture and art, music, the diaspora, and contemporary Ukraine. The book's easy-to-read narrative is enhanced by 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts that explain specific phenomena or address controversial issues. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence (U Toronto Press, 2018) provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating land of Ukraine and two of its most historically significant peoples. 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
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    56 m
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