Episodes

  • Ariel Evan Mayse, "Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

    Ariel Evan Mayse, "Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    Mar 16 2025
    In Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford UP, 2024), Ariel Evan Mayse faces up to an enduring question about the Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism: how did it manage to innovate in the realms of Jewish study and practice with such daring and yet at the same time produce communities ready and willing to subject themselves to the rigors of inherited Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Mayse turns to ritual studies rather than history or theology in order to grapple with this enigma, and does so with clarity, insight, and profound ambition. Avi Bernstein-Nahar is founder of 36learningmatters.com, a Jewish adult learning practice. Ariel Evan Mayse is associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University. 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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    53 mins
  • Fractured Alliances: Trump, Ukraine, and Europe's Security Dilemma

    Fractured Alliances: Trump, Ukraine, and Europe's Security Dilemma
    Mar 15 2025
    In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between the United States and Ukraine following a contentious meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Stoicescu critiques Trump's transactional diplomacy, emphasizing the critical role of alliances such as NATO in maintaining international peace and stability. He stresses Europe's need to strengthen its defense capabilities independently, warning that Europe's security depends on sustained and unified support for Ukraine. Stoicescu proposes a structured peace agreement, underscoring the necessity of robust international guarantees for Ukraine’s security. The conversation further explores Europe's shifting perspectives on military engagement in response to ongoing Russian aggression. 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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    32 mins
  • Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, "Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult" (Ibidem Press, 2014)

    Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, "Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult" (Ibidem Press, 2014)
    Mar 13 2025
    Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (Ibidem Verlag, 2014) is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed--despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustasa and the Slovak Hlinka Party--to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 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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    59 mins
  • Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025)

    Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025)
    Mar 9 2025
    East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated. But with the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarity in Poland in the Summer of 1980, communism went into steady decline and, between 1988 and 1991, crumbled. What followed has been an unsteady transition to various forms of often corrupt pluralism with democracy doing best in the Czech Republic (with the exception of the years 2017-2021) and Slovenia, and worst in Hungary, Albania, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This volume will be of interest not only to specialists in East Central Europe but also to graduate and undergraduate students, members of the diplomatic corps, and general readers. 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 hr and 33 mins
  • Stefan Cristian Ionescu, "Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Stefan Cristian Ionescu, "Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Mar 5 2025
    On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short term restitution. However, from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations which dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and many businesses were lost once again. Drawing on archival sources from government documentation to diaries and newspaper reports, Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950 (Cambridge UP, 2024) explores both the early success and later reversal of restitution policies. In doing so, it sheds light on the postwar treatment of Romanian Jewish survivors, and the reasons so many survivors emigrated from Romania. 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 hr and 21 mins
  • Tamizdat under Putin: A Discussion with Publisher Feliks Sandalov

    Tamizdat under Putin: A Discussion with Publisher Feliks Sandalov
    Mar 5 2025
    Russia has a long history of publishers operating from abroad, producing books and periodicals for a Russian-speaking audience. One notable example is The Bell (Kolokol), published by Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer and thinker who emigrated in the mid-19th century. The waves of Russian emigration in the 20th century—beginning with those fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—led to the creation of numerous Russian-language publishing ventures, ranging from short-lived projects to long-standing institutions. Among the most well-remembered are the YMCA Press in Paris, Posev and Grani in Germany, and Ardis Publishing, founded in the early 1970s—not by Russians, but by American literary scholars. Exiled Russian publishers not only printed the works of fellow émigré authors but also played a crucial role in tamizdat—smuggling manuscripts deemed ideologically unacceptable by the Soviet regime out of the USSR, publishing them abroad, and then covertly reintroducing them into the country for clandestine distribution. After Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, prompting the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians, it was only a matter of time before new émigré publishing houses emerged. In this conversation, we speak with Feliks Sandalov, co-founder and director of StraightForward, one of the newly established Russian publishing initiatives in exile, about his work and the evolving landscape of Russian publishing abroad. 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 hr and 1 min
  • Robert C. Austin, "Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King" (Central European UP, 2024)

    Robert C. Austin, "Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King" (Central European UP, 2024)
    Mar 4 2025
    Listen to this engaging podcast with historian Robert Austin, the author of Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King (Central European UP, 2024). In the book, Austin explains the rise and fall of Albania's first and only monarch, King Zog!. The road to becoming Europe's youngest president in 1925 and king of Albania in 1928 was paved with feuds and assassinations. Zog retained his power until his "friend" Mussolini ousted him in 1939. He left Albania with almost no roads or trains, thoroughly uneducated and utterly impoverished. Zog may have regretted sending a young Enver Hoxha to France on a state scholarship. But one thing Hoxha did learn from Zog: it makes sense to have your rivals murdered. In this podcast, Austin talks about Zog, Albania's communist project, Italy's interest in the Balkans, Albania's limited reckoning with its communist human rights violations and its failure to identify a "usable past." 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 hr and 3 mins
  • László Borhi, "Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" (Central European UP, 2024)

    László Borhi, "Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" (Central European UP, 2024)
    Mar 3 2025
    A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. In Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes (Central European UP, 2024), László Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people. Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience. 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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    48 mins