One was a teenage Jewish girl, forcibly transported from her home in Hungary to a Nazi concentration camp. The other was a British doctor, whose experiences serving in two world wars could not compare to the horrors he saw at the end of the war. In her book All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Bernice Lerner describes their lives – one of them her mother, the other one of the people who helped save her – and how th...
Oct 16, 2020•46 min•Ep. 189
The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In captu...
Oct 12, 2020•48 min•Ep. 13
Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius. Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the latest s...
Oct 07, 2020•39 min•Ep. 28
In 2017, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People , the historic petition authored by William L. Patterson, was published in its third edition. It has been nearly 70 years since Patterson, who passed away in 1980, and Paul Roberson, who passed away in 1976, presented the petition to the United Nations General Assembly, charging the United States government with genocide under the United National Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Wil...
Sep 25, 2020•40 min•Ep. 125
Rwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. And while, shockingly, the event was not given enough attention by the international community at the time, Rwanda’s genocide later led to reform and innovation in order to prevent and respond to such crises and to help the recovery of societies post conflicts. In this episode, Dr. Philip Drew, Associa...
Sep 23, 2020•22 min•Ep. 23
The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again--that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche--deeper than prejudice itself--leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Smith...
Sep 18, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 124
Rwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. And while, shockingly, the event was not given enough attention by the international community at the time, Rwanda’s genocide later led to reform and innovation in order to prevent and respond to such crises and to help the recovery of societies post conflicts. In this episode, Dr. Philip Drew, Associa...
Sep 09, 2020•19 min•Ep. 23
In 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds. But it turns out that, sometimes, they did. And even when they didn’t, petitioning local, regional or national officials (often all at the same time) could delay deportations or punishments or even function as a form of resistance. Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (Berghahn Books...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 121
The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated...
Sep 07, 2020•38 min•Ep. 122
Like so many Americans, American Jews supported President Roosevelt. They adored him. They believed in him. They idolized him. Perhaps they shouldn’t have. Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (Jewish Publication Society) reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, t...
Aug 31, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 26
How did the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns affect other elections in 2016? How did the use of gender stereotypes and insulting references to women in the presidential campaign influence the way House and Senate candidates campaigned? The 2016 American elections forced scholars and candidates to reassess the role that gender plays in elections. In Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (Oxford UP, 2019), Robert G. Boatright and Valerie Sperling (professors ...
Aug 24, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 472
The phenomenon of dehumanization is associated with such atrocities as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust in World War II. In these and other cases, people are described in ways that imply that they are less than fully human as a prelude to committing extreme forms of violence against them. In On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020), David Livingstone Smith analyzes what dehumanization is, why are we prone to dehumanize, and how we might resi...
Aug 10, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 224
The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is turning twenty-five. One of the first academic journals focused on the study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it has been one of a few journals that led the field in new directions. So it seemed appropriate to mark the moment by talking with Richard Breitman , its long-time editor. Breitman is professor emeritus at American University and the author of several books on German history and the Holocaust. We talk in the interview about the orig...
Aug 07, 2020•46 min•Ep. 120
For the second time, Nick Estes has been gracious enough to participate in a New Books Network podcast to discuss his book Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019). (Listen to Ryan Tate’s interview for New Books in the American West here ). This second interview focuses more on a genocide studies reading of Dr. Estes’ book, raising questions about the history of genocide against Indigenous peoples, a...
Jul 16, 2020•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 119
Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As Sabine Hildebrandt reveals in The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2017), howe...
Jul 09, 2020•25 min•Ep. 118
How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that Anglo-American dominated histories capture the moment while missing the story. Drawing upon secret archives open for a few brief years during Russia’s liberalization, Francine Hirsch takes readers behind the scenes to private parties and late-night deliberations where the Nu...
Jul 09, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 751
History that reads like a thriller; The Good Assassin: How A Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down The Butcher of Latvia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) by Stephan Talty is the untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice—a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis. Before World War II, Herbert Cukurs was a famous figure in his small Latvian city, the “Charles Lindbergh of his country.” But by 1945, he was the Butcher of Latvia,...
Jul 06, 2020•41 min•Ep. 749
The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “gre...
Jul 02, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 191
Why did the word “Jakarta” appear as graffiti on the streets of Santiago in 1973? Why did left-wing Chilean activists receive postcards in the mail with the ominous message “Jakarta is coming”? Why did a Brazilian general lose his temper in an interview with university students, threaten their safety, and yell the name of Indonesia’s capital city? In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020) journalist Vincen...
Jul 01, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 744
On the night of September 30/October 1, 1965, a bungled coup d’état resulted in the deaths of a handful of Indonesian generals and a young girl. Within days the Indonesian army claimed that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, was responsible. This set in motion the confusing, mysterious, and often perplexing events in 1965 that led to the downfall of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno – an anti-impe...
Jun 24, 2020•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 737
When Americans think about trials of Holocaust perpetrators, they generally think of the Nuremberg Trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann or perhaps of the Frankfort trials of perpetrators from Auschwitz. If they think of Polish trials at all, they likely assume these were show trials driven by political goals rather than an interest in justice. Gabriel Finder and Alexander Prusin 's book Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (University of Toronto Press, 2018) shows...
Jun 22, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 117
In Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Co-editors David Slucki , Loti Smorgon Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, Gabriel N. Finder , professor in the department of German Languages and Literatures and former director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia and Avinoam Patt , the Doris and Simon Konover Professor of Judaic Studies and direct...
Jun 22, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 188
At Newman I co-teach a class titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." I teach the course with a Professor of Theology and it's designed to help students understand the ways in which the Holocaust shaped the world they live in. It is, in a sense, designed to help students gain insight. John K. Roth 's new book Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide (Cascade Books, 2020) may become a required text in this course. His book is different than, I think, any other books ...
Jun 15, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 115
In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Alison D. Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes draw on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women to explore Mayan women’s agency in their search for truth, justice, and reparation for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. ...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 14 min
The murder of two-thirds of European Jews, referred to by many as the Holocaust, did not begin June 22, 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, or September 1, 1939, with the beginning of WWII, or with 1938 Kristallnacht, or even with the 1933 rise of Hitler. According to Alexander Gendler , it began on August 1, 1914, with the start of WWI, of which WWII was just its continuation. It was then that Russia's Imperial Army of Nicholas II committed the now largely forgotten genocide of ...
Jun 08, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 186
Earlier this year the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. An occasion for mourning and reflection also offered a chance to reflect on the state of research about the genocide. Among the many books that were published in the past year, Joyce E. Leader 's new book From Hope to Horror: Diplomacy and the Making of the Rwanda Genocide (Potomac Books, 2020) stands out. Leader was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Rwanda from 1991 through April 1994. As such, she was ideally positio...
Jun 05, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 114
Stanislav Kulchytsky ’s The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomo r (CIUS Press, 2018) presents a meticulous research that unveils the mechanism of the Holodomor as a man-made famine, which was launched in Ukraine by the Soviets as a punitive and controlling measure undertaken to discipline and suppress those, peasants in the first place, who might have rebelled against the Soviet programs such as collectivization. With this book, Kulchytsky offers a complex approach to unde...
Jun 05, 2020•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 64
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival . He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the...
Jun 02, 2020•2 hr 1 min•Ep. 20
In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation that most perpetrators of murder were male, men were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they negotiated roles as fathers, spouses, community leaders, prisoners, soldiers, professionals, authority figures, resistors, chroniclers, or ideologues. The contributors...
May 26, 2020•53 min•Ep. 184
What happens when a court tries to become a “new” court? What happens to the many artifacts of its history—previous laws and jurisprudence, the building that it inhabits, the people who weave in and out of it? This is the question that grounds Alex Jeffrey ’s new book, The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the making of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through extensive engagements with the different actors working in and ...
Apr 29, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 25
