Caught between wars raging in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Greece is an island of relative stability. Popularly considered the cradle of Western civilisation, this is a Christian Orthodox state on the edge of the Islamic world. And, after a half-century of integration into NATO and the EU, Greece is now reabsorbing into the Near East, as the West fractures and new Middle Eastern powers rise. The country’s importance as a cultural and geopolitical hybrid is growing.

Travelling through the region, Sean Mathews explores at ground level the tectonic shifts reshaping Europe and the Middle East. He meets the last Greek merchants in Cairo, and hears from Istanbul’s remaining Greeks about Turkey’s break with the West. In Jerusalem, he discovers a budding alliance between Greece and Israel; and in a faded Ottoman port, he encounters football hooligans loyal to a Russian oligarch.

The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst, 2025) is a bold reappraisal of Greece as a Near Eastern nation uncovers its Byzantine and Ottoman past as a key to survival in today’s chaotic, shrinking world.

Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others. He calls Athens home and travels often in the region. This is his first book.

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. He is also a host on the Thinking Global podcast for E-International Relations. 

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Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices.

This experiment in reading Public Books articles aloud--akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side--follows on from JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles and 2026 article about the Pope and AI. You can consult the footnotes on Agnes Heller and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original 2019 form here.

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Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and fascist movements from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. The study examines how fascists attempted to unite across borders by forming international organizations and networks, hosting conferences and exhibitions, disseminating multilingual publications, and exchanging propaganda. Their transnational cooperation was fuelled by shared ideas of ultranationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, antisemitism, racism, white supremacism, and Europeanism. The book argues that fascist internationalism, marked by contradictions, limitations, and an Italo-German rivalry, emerged in the 1930s as a counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism. The epilogue discusses reverberations in the Second World War and the postwar period and outlines the relevance of this history for understanding contemporary forms of far-right internationalism.

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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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In this episode, hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Farid Hafez to discuss his most recently published book Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford UP, 2026). Hafez’s recent work centres on the comparative analysis of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the German rule in Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon, and in particular their respective treatment of Muslims in each case to then in turn shed light on the current governing of Muslimness in both. Farid Hafez is an assistant professor in International Relations at William and Mary, and also a senior researcher at Georgetown University.

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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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In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast host Andrea Talabér talked to Michal Frankl, Doina Anca Cretu and Lidia Zessin-Jurek about the new edited volume Refugees and Citizens in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe: An Unlikely Refuge? We discussed the reception of the ERC-project the volume is based on at a time of heightened narratives about refugees and the place of Central and Eastern Europe in the scholarship, reflecting on the current relevance of the project.

The Zotero bibliography for the project is openly available, please click here to access it.

You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: here
 

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. 

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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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How are museums adapting to the digital age, and what transformations are taking place in institutions we often consider to be highly conservative? In this episode, researcher Aya Kimura shares her fascination with museums in both Japan and Lithuania, as well as insights from her research and analysis over the past several years. For those who read Japanese, more details can be found in Aya Kimura’s book Museums of the Digital Age (デジタル時代の博物館), published by Kadensha.

Aya Kimura is Associate Professor, Department of Human Sciences, Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine

The episode is hosted by Linas Didvalis, an Associate Professor at Centre for Asian Studies at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Host: Linas Didvalis 

Find the book here

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Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?

In Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food (Columbia UP, 2026), Professor Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came to signify enduring attachment to homeland, family, religion, and culture. In time, they as well as new generations and new immigrant waves gradually transformed Polish American culinary culture, reflecting food trends and changes in the United States, Poland, and the world.

Pierogi takes readers into the kitchens where Polish American families, friends, and community organizations carry on the custom of cooking and eating together. Dr. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann highlights small- and large-scale pierogi producers who adapted traditional dishes for the US market and food celebrities who mainstreamed them, and she traces the symbolic representation of pierogi in popular culture. She also shares personal stories, from her family’s resourcefulness in communist-era Poland facing near-constant food shortages to her experiences as an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from historical and recent cookbooks to interviews with Polish American entrepreneurs and community members, this book offers new insights for anyone interested in East Central European and American foodways.

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.

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In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia's Sakha Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth's coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, he continued on his journey, meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way.

Yet his trip ended in fear and confusion, with an arrest and a month in a Yakutsk jail, the story of his new book, On Thin Ice: An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival (Duckworth, 2026)

Charlie is an award-winning explorer, author and international keynote speaker. He has travelled over 60,000 miles by foot, horse, raft, bicycle, ski and dugout canoe, in places as varied as the Tibetan plateau, the Mongolian steppe, the Congolese jungle, the Arctic tundra, the highlands of New Guinea and the Sahara desert. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Award winner, and the author of Through Sand & Snow (Nielsen UK: 2021) and On Roads That Echo (Nielsen UK: 2021)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On Thin Ice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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