What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by? Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception. Mark Roseman offers a sophisticated and deeply human exploration of this question in his new book Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2019). The book is a careful examination of a small organization called “League: Community for Socialist Life.” Generally referred ...
Sep 20, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 100
Alex Kay ’s The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a must read for those interested in the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and World War II. Focusing on the actions and consequences of a “front-line Holocaust perpetrator”, Kay’s biographies diverges drastically with the traditional bios of other more well-known Nazis. Kay argues that Filbert chose to become an exceptional Nazi Party member and his career as well as his life hin...
Sep 16, 2019•48 min•Ep. 99
Jeffrey Ostler ’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (Yale University Press, 2019) is the first of what will be a two-volume set that comprehensively chronicles the devastating effects of U.S. expansionism on Native Nations. Surviving Genocide covers the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War. In it Ostler makes the compelling argument that American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and what ...
Sep 11, 2019•54 min•Ep. 98
In her new book, Social Aspects of Memory: Stories of Victims and Perpetrators from Bosnia-Herzegovina (Routledge, 2019). Alma Jeftić presents the compelling results of an empirical psychological study on how ordinary people remember war, drawing on narratives from two generations of people in Sarajevo and neighboring East Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. This book sheds light on how collective memories are cultivated in the aftermath of violence, and how commemorative practices can be employed for...
Sep 02, 2019•57 min•Ep. 52
Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel , in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's question with a resounding yes. Finkel is interested in a very specific question: What made individual Jews choose from a variety of different strategies in responding to the threat posed by German violence. He lays out several possible strategies for survival, ranging from cooperation and collaborati...
Aug 22, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 97
How can this happen? If there's any question that people interested in genocide ask, it's this one. How can people do this to each other? How can this be possible? What is wrong with this world that this can happen? Maureen Hiebert 's book Constructing Genocide and Mass Violence: Society, Crisis, Identity (Routledge, 2017) offers an answer to this question. Hiebert is a political scientist and approaches the subject through that lens. She reminds us that societies engage in genocide because it o...
Aug 16, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 96
Sometimes it seems that there’s nothing left to say about mass violence in the 20th century. But the new edited volume Let Them Not Return: Sayfo – The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire (Berghahn Books, 2017), draws our attention to a conflict that even most scholars know little about—the persecution and killing of Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians during and after the First World War. In the book, editors David Gaunt , Naures Atto , Sone...
Aug 13, 2019•52 min•Ep. 93
Are ethnic conflicts in Africa the product of age-old ancient hatreds? Tsega Etefa ’s new book, The Origins of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Politics and Violence in Darfur, Oromia, and the Tana Delta (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), provides an answer, arguing that elites mobilize their co-ethnics for political gain. To do so, Etefa analyzed the historical roots of three different cases of ethnic conflict in Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. Not only does his new book tell us why elites mobilize ethnically, E...
Aug 07, 2019•52 min•Ep. 57
Today’s Namibia was once the German colony of South West Africa, for a 30-year period spanning of 1884 to 1915. From 1904-1908, German colonial troops committed the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero and Nama people, many of whom rebelled against the labour and land impositions of colonial rule. Victims of the genocide did not receive justice, for the German colonial authority considered the violence of the day to be a by-product of its policy of settler colonialism. Only in 2...
Jul 24, 2019•59 min•Ep. 56
In Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State University Press, 2019), David Slucki , Assistant Professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston, gives us a very different type of history book. Slucki’s memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on ...
Jul 23, 2019•38 min•Ep. 165
In his book Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans (University of Kentucky Press, 2017), Ambassador James W. Pardew describes the role of the U.S. involvement in ending the wars and genocide in the Balkans. As a soldier-diplomat, Pardew reminds us of the human nature of diplomacy. Pardew was the one of the major players in U.S. policy making, leading Balkan task forces. He was also a policy advisor to NATO. His book reflects the perspective of an experienced sold...
Jul 19, 2019•44 min•Ep. 95
The Holocaust was and remains a central trauma in Israel’s national consciousness. It has found ample expressions in Israeli documentary cinema from 1945 until the present. Third-generation Holocaust survivors were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. They grew up in a society which acts out the trauma and since the 1990s they have related to the Holocaust in a range of cultural fields. Remaking Holocaust Memory aims to paint the first comprehensive portrait of third-generation Holoc...
Jul 11, 2019•46 min•Ep. 17
Most of the time, memory studies focuses on well-known case studies. The result Is that we know lots about commemoration and memory regarding the Holocaust, about slavery, about apartheid, and other cases, but much less about how memory works in smaller states and less well-known tragedies. Erik Sjöberg 's new book The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (Berghahn Books, 2018) is an exception to this rule. Sjöberg is interested in the violence and ex...
Jul 01, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 92
Carolyn J. Dean ’s The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the cultural history of the idea of the “witness to genocide” in Western Europe and the United States. She portrays the witness in non-traditional genocide court trials as the moral compass. In fact, many of these “moral witnesses” were not utilized for their testimony to identify perpetrators or mass murder, but rather a symbolic voice for survivor’s that would not normally be adm...
Jun 19, 2019•38 min•Ep. 91
Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people. He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running sout...
Jun 13, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 90
Jennifer Dixon ’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official version of history initially advocated by both states was similar in its adherence to a strategy of silencing critics and relativizing or denying the massacre, but Dixon shows how the two governments’ narratives of the...
Jun 06, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 272
In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military commander and strategist. That Hitler saw World War II as the only way to retrieve Germany’s fortunes and build an expansionist Thousand-Year Reich is uncontroversial. But while his generals did sometimes object to Hitler’s tactics and operational direction, they often made the same errors in judgment ...
May 21, 2019•1 hr 17 min
Last month Rwanda commemorated the 25th anniversary of the genocide. Unlike the recent outpouring of books marking hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, there was only a short flurry of newspaper and radio remembrances of the events of April and May of 1994. The number of book-length narratives was similarly small. Now Andrew Wallis has published a significant new survey of the origins and aftermath of the genocide. Stepp’d in Blood: Akazu and the Architects of the Rwandan Gen...
May 16, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 89
In his book, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Henning Pieper , examines the conduct of the SS Cavalry Brigade during World War II. The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a dual role: SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front. Pieper’s book highlights an understudied as...
Apr 30, 2019•56 min•Ep. 63
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick , whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press ) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments o...
Mar 19, 2019•32 min•Ep. 15
What does it mean to consider trauma and media from the perspective of technology and not from that of the subject of trauma, the clinician or the witness? In Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford University Press, 2019), Amit Pinchevski carries out this thought experiment to great effect. By bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, this book reveals the technical operations that inform the understanding of traumatic impact on bodies and minds. Under consideration ...
Mar 13, 2019•49 min•Ep. 36
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone inte...
Feb 26, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 47
How do you put Humpty-Dumpty back together again? Susan Thomson 's new book Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (Yale University Press, 2018) examines the postwar history of Rwanda to consider the ways the Rwandan genocide shaped governance, policy and memory in that country. She begins by recounting what we now know about the genocide, revisiting older interpretations, revising some common assumptions and rethinking earlier arguments. But most of her book is about the way the RPF understo...
Feb 25, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 87
Daniel Unowsky's book isn't about a genocide or other incident of mass violence. Instead, The Plunder examines a series of riots against Jews in Habsburg Galicia in the year 1898. Unowsky tries to understand how, in an Empire built around the idea of the rule of law, anti-Jewish violence could erupt so quickly and then fade away almost as rapidly. Unowsky examines the riots in detail, exploring their background, the personalities and the background of the perpetrators, and the responses of the v...
Feb 19, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 88
How do you write a textbook about genocide? Consider what such a textbook must do. It needs to integrate insights from a variety of disciplines. It must make complicated legal and definitional issues clear and compelling. It needs to make historical accounts meaningful yet concise. It needs to consider the question of what the field is for and whether a call to action is appropriate in a text. And it must do all this while remaining sensitive to the emotionally challenging nature of the material...
Jan 03, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 86
How did the search for Nazi fugitives become a vehicle to oppose South American dictatorships? Daniel Stahl ’s award-winning new book traces the story of three continents over the course of half a century in Hunt for Nazis: South America's Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Through a rich transnational history, Daniel traces the ebb and flow of political will alongside the cooperation between far flung governments and civil society groups. The re...
Dec 26, 2018•55 min•Ep. 58
McKenzie Wark ’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the b...
Dec 06, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 14
In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens , professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive history of the SA, from the early 1920s until Nazi Germany’s total defeat in 1945. Siemens demonstrates how the SA evolved from a small organization to a massive and potent force that directly impacted the Nazi rise to power, and how that organization shaped German society during the Nazi period. He tack...
Nov 28, 2018•48 min
In A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society (Indiana University Press, 2018), edited by Michael Brenner , Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at the American University in Washington DC, has assembled a number of scholars to give a comprehensive account of German Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st century. This volume will be the essential text on the topic f...
Nov 12, 2018•34 min
While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient attention. With Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Shannon Fogg , Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T, fills this void. Drawing from government archives, Jewish...
Oct 25, 2018•1 hr
