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  • Francisco Martínez, "The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia" (Cornell UP, 2025)

    Francisco Martínez, "The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia" (Cornell UP, 2025)
    2026/04/28
    How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers. The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area. Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. His email address is francisco.martinez14@um.es. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. 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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    55 分
  • Gennady Estraikh, "The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia" (Bloombury, 2023)

    Gennady Estraikh, "The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia" (Bloombury, 2023)
    2026/04/26
    In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Gennady Estraikh. His book titled, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) was published as a part of the "Russian Shorts" series. Gennady Estraikh's book explores the birth, growth, demise and afterlife of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). The History of Birobidzhan looks at how the shtetl was widely used in Soviet propaganda as a perfect solution to the 'Jewish question', arguing that in reality, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the JAR played a key, and essentially detrimental, role in determining Jewish rights and entitlements in the Soviet world. Estraikh brings together a broad range of Russian and Yiddish sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, travelogues, memoirs, belles-letters, and scholarly publications, as he describes and analyses the project and its realization not in isolation, but rather in the context of developments in both domestic and international life. As well as offering an assessment of the Birobidzhan project in the contexts of Soviet and Jewish history, the book also focuses on the contemporary 'Jewish' role of the region which now has only a few thousand Jewish occupants amongst its residents. 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 時間
  • Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    2026/04/21
    Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands. The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Professor Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and the Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia’s social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government—protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Professor Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia’s democracy during a moment of acute global instability. The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, the capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Dr. Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 時間 5 分
  • Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union" (Stanford UP, 2026)

    Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union" (Stanford UP, 2026)
    2026/04/20
    In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. 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
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    1 時間 2 分
  • Kristan Stoddart, "Russia's Hybrid Warfare Offensive Against the West" (de Gruyter, 2025)

    Kristan Stoddart, "Russia's Hybrid Warfare Offensive Against the West" (de Gruyter, 2025)
    2026/04/19
    Kristan Stoddart's Russia's Hybrid Warfare Offensive Against the West (de Gruyter, 2025) is a timely and systematic analysis of Russian hybrid warfare with a particular focus on Russian cyberespionage and cyberwarfare. It especially analyzes Russian policy from the election of President Vladmir Putin in 2000 to date. It takes a long term, long lens, view of Russian policies and actions internationally and domestically, fundamentally questioning the relationship and boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare. The most up-to-date and systematic analysis of Russia’s hybrid warfare. Draws on a wide range of multi-disciplinary literature. Questions the boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare. Dr. Kristan Stoddart is an Associate Professor at Swansea University where he is director of the Geopolitical Challenges Research Institute. Previously he was a Reader in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. From 2014 to 2017, Kristan was part of a £1.2 million project examining Cyber Security Lifecycles funded by Airbus Group and the Welsh Government. He also was a member of the UK’s Independent Digital Ethics in Policing Panel for around four years through to 2018. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of eight books and many articles and book chapters.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. 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 時間 21 分
  • From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony

    From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony
    2026/04/19
    After escaping the Vilna Ghetto and surviving winter in the forest among partisan fighters, Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow in 1944. The renowned Yiddish poet turned to memoir to detail his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. In his sobering account, Sutzkever details the Nazi occupation and establishment of the ghetto, daily life in the ghetto, and mass killings at Ponar. He also details armed Jewish resistance, how Jews organized collectively to retain their dignity, and demand for historical justice. The memoir, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony, was originally published in Yiddish in 1946, and has been translated into English for the first time by professor of Jewish studies and world literatures Justin Cammy. Join Justin Cammy and YIVO's Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent for a discussion of the great poet’s account of the Holocaust. Buy the book This book talk originally took place on January 27, 2022. 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 時間
  • Karolina Przewrocka-Aderet, "Polanim: From Poland to Israel" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)

    Karolina Przewrocka-Aderet, "Polanim: From Poland to Israel" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)
    2026/04/19
    What does it mean to leave one's homeland behind—and how do memories of that place shape the next generation? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with journalist and author Katarzyna Przewrocka-Aderet to discuss her book Polanim: From Poland to Israel, a sweeping portrait of Jews whose lives stretched between Poland and Israel. Blending literary journalism with oral history, Polanim draws on extensive interviews with Israelis of Polish origin and their children. Each chapter centers on a different experience—memories of prewar antisemitism, the devastation of postwar Poland, or the political expulsions of 1968—and the difficult journeys that carried families from Poland to Palestine and later Israel. Through these individual stories, Przewrocka-Aderet captures nearly a century of Jewish life, from the 1920s through the 1990s. The people she profiles left at different moments and under different circumstances: some fleeing hostility, some escaping unbearable loss, others forced out by political pressure. They arrived with different languages, classes, politics, and hopes—but their lives reveal how identity is shaped not only by history, but by the unpredictable paths of human experience. Together, Przewrocka-Aderet and Katz explore the emotional weight of migration, the persistence of memory across generations, and how the story of Polish Jews continues to echo in Israeli society today. Katarzyna Przewrocka-Aderet is a journalist and writer whose work focuses on Jewish history, migration, and memory. In Polanim: From Poland to Israel, she combines in-depth interviews with narrative storytelling to illuminate the lives of Israelis of Polish origin and the complex histories that shaped them. Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with scholars and storytellers, Katz brings history, memory, and Jewish experience into conversation with contemporary life. 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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    51 分
  • Katharina Wiedlack, "Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

    Katharina Wiedlack, "Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
    2026/04/12
    Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures (Academic Studies Press, 2025) examines the New Cold War between Anglophone Western and Russian media, focusing on its coverage of LGBTIQ+ topics and representations of Russian femininity, masculinity, racial and gender diversity, and disability. It interrogates how the Anglophone media constructs images of vulnerable bodies and groups in Russia, juxtaposing them with the vengeful state and the powerful figure of Putin. These media discourses delineate and unify liberal values as American and Western and contrast them with "backward" Russian values. Paradoxically, in its endeavor to accentuate American dominance and its role in global affairs, various news outlets and entertainment media amplify homophobic, heteronormative, and racist narratives stemming from Russian sources and lend support to Putin's self-portrayal as a formidable opponent to the West. While the West expresses outrage at Putin’s criminalization of LGBTIQ+ activity, it draws on homophobic language to mock his shirtless horse-riding and “bromance” with Trump; the West condemns Russia's oppression of women, yet peddles the Orientalist idea of the "Slavic Femme"―that is, the hypersexualized trickster. 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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    41 分