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New Books in Eastern European Studies

New Books in Eastern European Studies

Written by: New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studiesNew Books Network Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe with Owen Grey (Bloomsbury, 2026)
    Oct 20 2026

    Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the first in-depth, English-language study of Romania's role in the Little Entente-an alliance formed with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to defend the territorial status quo in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War. While this alliance has often been dismissed in international historiography as peripheral, this book argues that the Little Entente was a critical, albeit fragile, experiment in regional security and interwar diplomacy. Anchored in Romania's foreign policy, it reinterprets the alliance as a revealing case study in small-state agency, collective security, and the entropic pressures of the post-war order. Whilst drawing on a wide range of Romanian diplomatic archives, press materials, and memoirs, many of which remain underutilized in anglophone scholarship, Grey also situates Romania's actions within the larger European context, assessing how regional alliances engaged with the League of Nations and evolving relationships with France, Germany, Italy, and Soviet Russia. Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe moves beyond simplistic narratives of failure and instead presents a nuanced portrait of the Little Entente as a fragile, flawed, but earnest effort to secure peace in a precarious international order-one whose lessons resonate powerfully today.


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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction with Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
    Oct 14 2026

    Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction (Academic Studies Press, 2024) confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.


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    35 mins
  • Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100 with Kalman Weiser (Wayne State UP, 2026)
    Oct 9 2026

    This comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—a groundbreaking American Jewish cultural organization, library, and research center—details its longstanding efforts to preserve eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbolic pinnacle of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture.

    Yet post-war, YIVO struggled to establish itself on a new continent, to reclaim what had survived of its Vilna collections, to document a lost world, and to impart the value of eastern European Jewish history and culture to new generations. Through the institute's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and beyond, Yiddish language learning and scholarship became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life in a time when Hebrew was increasingly promoted in Jewish communities. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Weiser focuses on the transitional period of the YIVO Institute from 1940 to 1970 and showcases how the institute carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos—"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"—while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.

    Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University.

    Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.


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    59 mins
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