As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."

Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

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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Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer who studied the Jews of the Russian Empire. During his 1911-1914 expeditions to shtetls in Ukraine—he would report—he and his co-workers took 1000 photographs, recorded 1000 Yiddish songs and 1500 stories, and purchased 400 objects for a Jewish museum. The expedition also inspired An-ski to write his signature play, The Dybbuk. Although East European Jews used ethnographic tools to study themselves both before and after An-ski’s expeditions, he retains an outsize status in the field of Yiddish ethnography, strongly tied to the success of his play. This talk explores the connections between An-ski’s ethnographic work, his play, and the Russian politics of his era.

This lecture originally took place on July 8, 2021.

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In this unique “history from below,” Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe (Cornell University Press, 2021) chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee.

As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old.

Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons’ camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.

Ruth Balint is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of When Migrants Fail to Stay (Bloomsbury, 2023), Smuggled: An Illegal History of Migration (NewSouth, 2021), and Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen & Unwin, 2008).

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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The question of origins is often difficult to study because originators do not always leave a paper trail. Therefore, uncovering origins can be challenging – and the story of the background of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe is no exception. It is complicated by the fact that in the recent past the Jewish population of the area was in the millions and it is not obvious where they came from. It is tempting for some to see them as having come from the Rhineland in search of safety and security but there are many reasons to be dubious about this. What is much more likely, as we shall see, is that the basis for the Yiddish-speaking Jewish population of Eastern Europe was the Jewish population of what is now the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria. They came in dribs and drabs because of economic pressures. We will examine various pieces of evidence that support this picture. While not dramatic, it was pragmatic and successful. Economic changes in the Polish-Lithuanian lands offered new opportunities to Jews and this in turn, led to conditions of rapid population growth – rapid enough to create a massive population within several centuries.

This lecture was originally held on July 22, 2021.

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Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Jeffrey Veidlinger’s new book In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust draws upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, showing for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Join us for a discussion on this important new book featuring Jeffrey Veidlinger in conversation with Steven Zipperstein.

This book talk originally took place on November 30, 2021.

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In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan spoke with Haris Tagari about his recent journey to Sarajevo in a 20 year old Toyota Yaris. Along the way he documented lost Islamic history throughout Europe, before arriving in Bosnia where he discusses genocide, solidarity and Muslim identity. Haris is a freelance journalist working as a reporter and videographer, with a degree in history from the University of Lancaster. Haris is widely known for his Instagram series, travelling to and reporting on destroyed and lost Muslim heritage across the world. He has filmed documentaries and political explainers from Syria, Iraq, Turkiye, Bosnia, Kosovo, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro. You can follow the journeys of Haris in a Yaris on Instagram @harristory.

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How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers.

The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area.

Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. His email address is [email protected].

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Gennady Estraikh. His book titled, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) was published as a part of the "Russian Shorts" series. Gennady Estraikh's book explores the birth, growth, demise and afterlife of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). The History of Birobidzhan looks at how the shtetl was widely used in Soviet propaganda as a perfect solution to the 'Jewish question', arguing that in reality, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the JAR played a key, and essentially detrimental, role in determining Jewish rights and entitlements in the Soviet world. Estraikh brings together a broad range of Russian and Yiddish sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, travelogues, memoirs, belles-letters, and scholarly publications, as he describes and analyses the project and its realization not in isolation, but rather in the context of developments in both domestic and international life. As well as offering an assessment of the Birobidzhan project in the contexts of Soviet and Jewish history, the book also focuses on the contemporary 'Jewish' role of the region which now has only a few thousand Jewish occupants amongst its residents.

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Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands.

The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Professor Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and the Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia’s social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government—protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Professor Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia’s democracy during a moment of acute global instability.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, the capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Dr. Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism.

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 their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works.

Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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What does it mean to leave one's homeland behind—and how do memories of that place shape the next generation? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with journalist and author Katarzyna Przewrocka-Aderet to discuss her book Polanim: From Poland to Israel, a sweeping portrait of Jews whose lives stretched between Poland and Israel.

Blending literary journalism with oral history, Polanim draws on extensive interviews with Israelis of Polish origin and their children. Each chapter centers on a different experience—memories of prewar antisemitism, the devastation of postwar Poland, or the political expulsions of 1968—and the difficult journeys that carried families from Poland to Palestine and later Israel.

Through these individual stories, Przewrocka-Aderet captures nearly a century of Jewish life, from the 1920s through the 1990s. The people she profiles left at different moments and under different circumstances: some fleeing hostility, some escaping unbearable loss, others forced out by political pressure. They arrived with different languages, classes, politics, and hopes—but their lives reveal how identity is shaped not only by history, but by the unpredictable paths of human experience.

Together, Przewrocka-Aderet and Katz explore the emotional weight of migration, the persistence of memory across generations, and how the story of Polish Jews continues to echo in Israeli society today.

Katarzyna Przewrocka-Aderet is a journalist and writer whose work focuses on Jewish history, migration, and memory. In Polanim: From Poland to Israel, she combines in-depth interviews with narrative storytelling to illuminate the lives of Israelis of Polish origin and the complex histories that shaped them.

Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with scholars and storytellers, Katz brings history, memory, and Jewish experience into conversation with contemporary life.

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