Episodi

  • Karolina Przewrocka-Aderet, "Polanim: From Poland to Israel" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)

    Karolina Przewrocka-Aderet, "Polanim: From Poland to Israel" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)
    Apr 19 2026
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 min
  • Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

    Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)
    Feb 8 2026
    In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and contradictory figure – a socialist and a nationalist, a clandestine agitator and a legendary military strategist, protector of Jews and other national minorities on Polish soil who was nonetheless often accused of imperialism – has eluded serious biographical treatment in English until now. Yeshiva University professor Joshua D. Zimmerman offers a nuanced, readable, and definitive account of the man who re-founded the independent state of Poland in 1918. Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland (Harvard University Press, 2022) could not be more timely, given the lessons to be learned from Piłsudski’s career by today’s opponents of far-right populism in Eastern Europe, and even more urgently – by English-language readers seeking to understand the imperative of preserving an independent Ukrainian state in the face of Russian aggression. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 ora e 38 min
  • Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)

    Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)
    Nov 24 2025
    Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. These old towns and their turbulent histories have been key sites in Europe’s ongoing theater of politics and war. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, the acclaimed writer Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history. Uncovering hidden stories behind these old and old-seeming façades in The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Kohn offers us a new understanding of the politics of European history-making—showing how our visits to old towns could promote belonging over exclusion, and empathy over indifference. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 ora
  • Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025)

    Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025)
    Nov 3 2025
    The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most storied events of the Holocaust, yet previous accounts of have almost entirely focused on its male participants. In The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising (Harper, 2025), Holocaust historian Elizabeth Hyman introduces five young, courageous Polish Jewish women—known as “the girls” by the leadership of the resistance and “bandits” by their Nazi oppressors—who were central to the Jewish resistance as fighters, commanders, couriers, and smugglers. They include:Zivia Lubetkin, the most senior female member of the Jewish Fighting Organization Command Staff in Warsaw and a reluctant legend in her own time, who was immortalized by her code name, "Celina"Vladka Meed, who smuggled dynamite into and illegal literature out of the Warsaw Ghetto in preparation for the uprisingDr. Idina “Inka” Blady-Schweiger, a young medical student who became a reluctant angel of mercyTema Schneiderman, a tall, beautiful and fearless young woman who volunteered for smuggling and rescue missions across Nazi-occupied Eastern EuropeTossia Altman, a heroic courier with a poetic soul, who helped bring arms into the Warsaw Ghetto, fought in the Uprising, and ferried communiques to the outside worldInterspersed with the stories of other Jewish women who resisted, The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto rescues these women from the shadows of time, bringing to light their resilience, bravery, and cunning in the face of unspeakable hardship—inspiring stories of courage, daring, and resistance that must never be forgotten. Elizabeth Hyman is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Polish Jews who fled their homeland in 1939 and ultimately made their way, as refugees, to the United States. She earned dual master’s degrees in History and Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland-College Park, and has written the history blog, “HISTORICITY (was already taken),” since 2011. She lives in New Paltz, New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 min
  • Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)
    Sep 8 2025
    In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social conservatism, old-school left-wing welfarism, and antipathy to Moscow and Brussels while also unravelling democratic institutions? It was, write Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley in Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2025), an experiment in "how much illiberalism the electorate would bear". With Kaczyński and PiS now in opposition but threatening a return in 2027, Donald Tusk's liberal administration is road-testing how effectively illiberalism can be unpicked without antagonising the voters it needs to stay in office. Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Ben Stanley is an associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Tim Gwynn Jones is policy analyst at Medley Advisors and a writer/podcaster at 242.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    40 min
  • Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, "Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48" (Cambridge UP, 2014)

    Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, "Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48" (Cambridge UP, 2014)
    Aug 16 2025
    Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge UP, 2014) tells a story of Polish and Slovak Holocaust survivors returning to homes that no longer existed in the aftermath of the Second World War. It focuses on their daily efforts to rebuild their lives in the radically changed political and social landscape of post-war Eastern Europe. Such an analysis shifts the perspective from post-war violence and emigration to post-war reconstruction. Using a comparative approach, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj discusses survivors' journeys home, their struggles to retain citizenship and repossess property, their coping with antisemitism, and their efforts to return to 'normality'. She emphasizes the everyday communal and personal experiences of survivors in the context of their relationships with non-Jews. In essence, by focusing on the daily efforts of Polish and Slovak Jews to rebuild their lives, the author investigates the limits of belonging in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 ora e 25 min
  • Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

    Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
    Aug 12 2025
    Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 min
  • Darius Von Guttner-Sporzynski, "The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy" (Brepols, 2024)

    Darius Von Guttner-Sporzynski, "The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy" (Brepols, 2024)
    Jul 21 2025
    The volume offers a re-examination of the rise of the Jagiellon dynasty in medieval and early modern Central Europe. Originating in Lithuania and extending its dominion to Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Jagiellon dynasty has left an enduring legacy in European history. This collection of studies presents the Jagiellons as rulers with dynamic and negotiated authority. It begins with the dynasty's origins and its dynastic union with Poland, milestones that have shaped the political and cultural trajectory of the dynasty's reign. The volume places significant emphasis on the role of royal consorts, thereby broadening traditional gender-focused perspectives. Far from being mere accessories, queens had a considerable influence on governance, economic matters, and diplomacy. The cultural impact of Jagiellon rule is analysed through interactions with humanists and the intellectual milieu of the court. The performative aspects of Jagiellon power, including the use of words, gestures, and even intentional silences, are examined as powerful tools of articulation. Emotional factors that influence governance and intricate dynastic relationships are explored, revealing how political decisions, especially constitutional reforms, are made more rapidly when faced with perceived dynastic vulnerabilities. In Poland, the rise of parliamentary institutions under the earlier Jagiellon monarchs epitomises the concept of negotiated authority, underscoring the growing political role of the nobility. This volume thus provides a multi-faceted and nuanced understanding of the Jagiellon dynasty's legacy in political, cultural, and gender-related spheres, enhancing understanding of European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    47 min