In The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (ForeEdge, 2017), David E. Fishman , Professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, tells the amazing story of the paper brigade of Vilna. The paper brigade were ghetto inmates who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts, hiding them first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets. This is a rare work that tells an amazing story in a very readable way, informed by yea...
Oct 23, 2018•33 min
This interview is the fourth and and final interview in a short series of podcasts about the mass violence in Indonesia. Earlier this year I talked with Geoff Robinson, Jess Melvin and Kate McGregor and Annie Pohlman about their works. All of them have written thoughtful, carefully researched and richly detailed analyses of the violence. Each of them shared a similar interest in the causes and nature of the violence. While their approaches varied, each attempted to shed new light on events which...
Oct 22, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Telling the history of the Holocaust in Hungary has long meant telling the story of 1944. Raz Segal, in his new book Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016), reminds us that this is only part of the story, and that focusing on 1944 misleads us about the nature of the violence in Hungary and in much of Eastern Europe. Segal’s book examines at a small area in the Carpathian mountains. By beginning in the 1800s, he is able to...
Oct 17, 2018•1 hr 17 min
How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin , Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, explores both of these approaches for thinking trauma in the the context of a range of historical examples. The book offers a detailed engagement with a host of theorists and theoretical positions from Freud and the theory of psychoanaly...
Oct 15, 2018•34 min
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is incorrect: even in California, for example, sterilization of those deemed mentally defective was performed up to 1977. In The Eugenic Mind Project (MIT Press, 2017), Robert A. Wilson critically considers the type of thinking — which he calls eugenic thinking — that drives eugenic sterilization pract...
Oct 15, 2018•1 hr 7 min
To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holocaust, one that Sara J. Brenneis identifies and fills in her new book Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Brenneis is interested in the ways Spanish prisoners (most of whom had fled Spain the aftermath of the Republican defea...
Oct 10, 2018•1 hr 1 min
It’s not often that you run across a smoking gun. Jess Melvin did, at an archive in Banda Aceh. Since the massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66, academics, journalists, politicians and military officials have argued about the motivations for the killing. With little documentation to draw from, these debates relied on careful analysis of context and circumstance. The result was widespread disagreement about how centralized the killing was and whether the killing was planned in advance. Melvin, in her...
Oct 01, 2018•54 min
What voices have been silenced in the history of the Holocaust? How did victims and perpetrators make sense of their experiences? How did the failed pursuit of post-war justice shape public memory? In her new book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mary Fulbrook uses diaries, memoirs, and trials to recover the full spectrum of suffering and guilt. By exposing the disconnect between official myths and unspoken realities of post-war ...
Sep 27, 2018•58 min
This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year. In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge Un...
Sep 06, 2018•1 hr 2 min
In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam , associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, examines how ordinary Italians became willing perpetrators and actively participated in the deportation of Italian Jews between 1943 and 1945. Levis Sullam challenges long held notions that Italians were largely resistant to deportations and protective of their Jewish neighbors. Through det...
Aug 28, 2018•1 hr 6 min
I don’t often start these blog posts with comments about the cover art. But the reproduction of Alit Ambara’s “After 1965,” featured on the cover of the new set of essays The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), fits the subject perfectly. The piece compels your gaze, while resisting easy interpretations and answers. I found the book much the same. The essays, edited by Katharine McGregor , Jess Melvin , Annie Pohlman , demand attention. Roughly ...
Jul 26, 2018•38 min
What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 during “the purge of the purgers?” In her newest book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2017), Dr. Lynne Viola dives into the previously secret records of the Ukrainian SSR NKVD (Stalinist-era secret police). She gives readers an intimate look at the arrest, interrogation and tria...
Jul 16, 2018•51 min
Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Waitman Beorn gives us a detailed overview of the Holocaust precisely here, in what he well called “the Epicenter of the Final Solution.” Waitman does an excellent job of describing Eastern European Jewry, the crooked path the Nazis took in deciding to attempt to o...
Jun 20, 2018•1 hr 38 min
As a graduate student, I spent quite a bit of time explaining to people how we needed to pay much more attention to the history of World War One in the East. What I didn’t realize is that we needed to see the war as it appeared from Istanbul just as much or more as we needed to see it from Vienna, Warsaw or Budapest. Hans-Lukas Kieser has played a critical role in beginning to flesh out our understanding of the war from an Ottoman perspective. His new political biography Talaat Pasha: Father of ...
Jun 19, 2018•1 hr 23 min
I first assigned Joshua Oppenheimer’s film “The Act of Killing” for my course in Comparative Genocide at Newman. The movie is a documentary about the mass violence in Indonesia beginning in 1965. My students and I found it chilling: emotionally moving, troubling, and enormously sad. Naturally, they had many questions. I wasn’t able to answer many of them. It turned out, the killings in Indonesia had received far less attention than other cases of mass violence. In the brief few years since then,...
Jun 04, 2018•1 hr 22 min
How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke , Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015). Walke’s research is based largely on post-war oral historie...
May 24, 2018•1 hr 3 min
What was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-Jewish persecution? In Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Shira Klein skillfully narrates the historical developments that belie this myth, and the complex process that have led to its perpetuation. By examining the experiences of Italian Jews during the Second...
May 21, 2018•57 min
It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go beyond these platitudes to determine exactly how this feedback loop works. John Nathaniel Clarke’s new book, British Media and the Rwandan Genocide (Routledge, 2018), uses Rwanda as a test case to tease out the relationship between media coverage and policy. To do so, he uses carefully structured, labor in...
May 04, 2018•1 hr 12 min
Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me about studying Poland. It was an engaging chat with a young woman very interested in exploring Poland and the relationship between Poles and Jews in contemporary Poland. Erica Lehrer ‘s Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press, 2013) is the flower of that research, and it has been worth the wait. In the ...
May 01, 2018•1 hr 9 min
In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their ...
Apr 27, 2018•50 min•Ep. 144
Today we are joined by Kevin Simpson , the author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016). In Soccer under the Swastika, Simpson recovers a largely forgotten history of the sports during Holocaust. Through a close reading of wartime memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and records from camps across Europe including Thereseinstadt and Auschwitz, Simpson illustrates the politicization of sports by the Nazi regi...
Apr 12, 2018•59 min
Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017), Thomas Weber highlights the years between 1918 and 1926 as the period in which Hitler’s worldview developed. Challenging Hitler’s own narrative, as well as the received wisdom it engendered, Weber puts paid to the idea that the future dictator was radicalized in Vienna or during the First World War...
Mar 27, 2018•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 30
How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich relied on terror to survive in his new book Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2016). By examining how Hitler maintained his popularity with tactical compromises in the face of protest, Nathan shows how the dictatorship sought to gradually change norms...
Feb 26, 2018•53 min
How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted how scholars and the public engage with the past? These are questions that Jeffrey Shandler, Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, grapples with in his new book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017) Shandler’s thoug...
Feb 19, 2018•55 min
On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native Americas peoples and lands. California author and editor Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of this conflict in The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books, 2017)....
Feb 09, 2018•56 min
In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach , Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University, examines the expulsion of nearly 3 million Germans from the Czech-German borderlands. Dr. Gerlach looks extensively at the economic factors that led to the expulsion of Germans from this area. He argues convincingly how the promise of property and social mobility contribu...
Feb 05, 2018•1 hr 1 min
What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral culpability for the Holocaust? Roger Frie explores the thorny issue of historical memory and intergenerational trauma in his new award winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017)....
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 6 min
One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small town or camp. In doing so you may miss the debates of diplomats and politicians. But you get a much better idea of how people actually experienced the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s new book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz...
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 6 min
This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re almost always talking about a mass atrocity that took place ‘before.’ Sam Totten ‘s new book Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People Under Siege: Accounts by Humanitarians in the Battle Zone (McFarland, 2017) is different. The book is a compilation of first hand accounts of people currently working in a crisis ...
Jan 24, 2018•1 hr 7 min
In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that is familiar to many within and without the academy—from bold, new angles. Rather than using the diary as a historical source, Goldberg’s book centers on the diary as its subject. In addition to closely analyzing the more well-known diaries of Victor Klemperer and Chaim Kaplan, Goldberg incorporates a ...
Jan 10, 2018•1 hr 15 min
