New Books in Eastern European Studies

In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities.Based on Oyman Başaran’s extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.Oyman Başaran is an associate professor of sociology at Bowdoin College.Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the “Other” to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now required the amplification of Turkishness as an essential concept of the new nation-state. The construction of Others served as a backdrop to the articulation of Turkishness –and for Turkey in many ways, the Arab in his keffiyeh and traditional garb constituted the ultimate Other.In Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other (Syracuse University Press, 2023), Ilkim Büke Okyar brings the everyday production of nationalist discourse into the mainstream political and historical narrative of modern Turkey. Okyar shifts the focus of inquiry from the abstract discourses of elite intellectuals to the visual rhetoric of popular culture, where Arabs as the non-national Others hold a front seat. Drawing upon previously neglected colloquial Turkish sources, Okyar challenges the notion that ethnoreligious stereotypes of Arabs are limited to the Western conception of the Other. She shows how the emergence of the printing press and the subsequent explosion of news media contributed to formulating the Arab as the binary opposite of the Turk. The book shows how the cartoon press became one of the most significant platforms in the construction, maintenance, and mobilization of Turkish nationalism through the perceived image of the Arab that was haunted forever by ethnic and religious origins.Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Nataša Jagdhuhn's Post-Yugoslav Metamuseums: Reframing Second World War Heritage in Postconflict Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) analyzes the reframing of Second World War heritage in the memorial museums of the post-socialist, post-conflict states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. In focusing on two specific models of memorial museum – the People’s Liberations Struggle Museum and the Museum of the Revolution – Jagdhuhn traces the treatment of Second World War heritage in socialist Yugoslavia both during the Yugoslav wars, and in successor states after the end of the conflict. In doing so, she provides new insight into the complex museological practices that have shaped this heritage.Nataša Jagdhuhn is Postdoctoral Fellow at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her research focuses on memory constructs in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, museum transformation in post-socialist Europe, the history of museology from a Global South perspective, and current debates on decolonizing heritage worldwide.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary--a liberal society in the nineteenth century--as a narrowly "Christian" nation in the aftermath of World War I. Drawing on impressive archival research, Hanebrink uncovers how political and religious leaders demanded that "Christian values" influence public life while insisting that religion should never be reduced to the status of a simple nationalist symbol.In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Cornell UP, 2018) also explores the emergence of the idea that a destructive "Jewish spirit" was the national enemy. In combining the historical study of antisemitism with more recent considerations of religion and nationalism, Hanebrink addresses an important question in Central European historiography: how nations that had been inclusive of Jews before World War I became rabidly antisemitic during the interwar period. As he traces the crucial and complex legacy of religion's role in shaping exclusionary antisemitic politics in Hungary, Hanebrink follows the process from its origins in the 1890s to the Holocaust and beyond.More broadly, In Defense of Christian Hungary squarely addresses the relationship between antisemitic words and antisemitic violence and between religion and racial politics, deeply contested issues in the history of twentieth-century Europe. The Hungarian example is a chilling demonstration of how religious nationalism can find a home even within a pluralist and tolerant civil society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never attacked Jews.Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2018) is a novel social-scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust. It locates the roots of violence in efforts to maintain Polish and Ukrainian dominance rather than in anti-Semitic hatred or revenge for communism. In doing so, it cuts through painful debates about relative victimhood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of perpetrators and victims. Pogroms, they conclude, were difficult to start, and local conditions in most places prevented their outbreak despite a general anti-Semitism and the collapse of the central state. Kopstein and Wittenberg shed new light on the sources of mass ethnic violence and the ways in which such gruesome acts might be avoided. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Béla Bodó's book Black Humor and the White Terror (Routledge, 2023) examines political humor as a reaction to the lost war, the post-war chaos, and antisemitic violence in Hungary between 1918 and 1922. While there is an increased body of literature on Jewish humor as a form of resistance and a means of resilience during the Holocaust, only a handful of studies have addressed Jewish humor as a reaction to physical attacks and increased discrimination in Europe during and after the First World War. The majority of studies have approached the issue of Jewish humor from an anthropological, cultural, or linguistic perspective; they have been interested in the humor of lower- or lower-middle-class Jews in the East European shtetles before 1914.On the other hand, this study follows a historical and political approach to the same topic and focuses on the reaction of urban, middle-class, and culturally assimilated Jews to recent events: to the disintegration of the Dual Monarchy, the collapse of law and order, increased violence, the reversal of Jewish emancipation and the rise of new and more pernicious antisemitic prejudices. The study sees humor not only as a form of entertainment and jokes as literature and a product of popular culture, but also as a heuristic device to understand the world and make sense of recent changes, as well as a means to defend one's social position, individual and group identity, strike back at the enemy, and last but not least, to gain the support and change the hearts and minds of non-Jews and neutral bystanders.Unlike previous scholarly works on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this study sees Budapest Jewish humor after WWI as a joint adventure: as a product of urban and Hungarian culture, in which Jewish not only played an important role but also cofounded. Finally, the book addressed the issue of continuity in Hungarian history, the "twisted road to Auschwitz" whether urban Jewish humor, as a form of escapism, helped to desensitize the future victims of the Holocaust to the approaching danger, or it continued to play the same defensive and positive role in the interwar period, as it had done in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Why aren't ordinary Russians more outraged by Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Inside the Kremlin's own historical propaganda narratives, Russia's invasion of Ukraine makes complete sense. From its World War II cult to anti-Western conspiracy theories, the Kremlin has long used myth and memory to legitimize repression at home and imperialism abroad, its patriotic history resonating with and persuading large swathes of the Russian population.In Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia (Bloomsbury, 2023), Russia analyst Jade McGlynn takes us into the depths of Russian historical propaganda, revealing the chilling web of nationwide narratives and practices perforating everyday life, from after-school patriotic history clubs to tower block World War II murals. The use of history to manifest a particular Russian identity has had grotesque, even gruesome, consequences, but it belongs to a global political pattern - where one's view of history is the ultimate marker of political loyalty, patriotism and national belonging. Memory Makers demonstrates how the extreme Russian experience is a stark warning to other nations tempted to stare too long at the reflection of their own imagined and heroic past.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The Second World War was arguably the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. In Stalin as Warlord (Yale University Press, 2022), eminent Russia specialist Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership through war cultivated a legacy that burdened the Soviet Union, and continues to burden Russia through its present-day invasion of Ukraine.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). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in The Times Literary Supplement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.In The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2023), Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault--on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament--the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia's ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia's idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post-Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Ivan and Phoebe (Deep Vellum, 2023) spotlights the uproarious generation that led the Ukrainian independence movement of 1990; from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule, it investigates the difficulties and absurdities of societal change and the families that change with it.Ivan and Phoebe chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Ukranian student protests of the 1990's, otherwise known as the Revolution On Granite or the "First Maidan." The story bounces between politically charged cities like Kyiv and Lviv, and protagonist Ivan's small, traditional hometown of Uzhgorod. As characters come to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, they must also re-evaluate the norms of marriage, family, and home life. While these initially appear to be spaces of peace and harmony, they are soon revealed to be hotbeds of conflict and multigenerational trauma.Married couple Ivan and Phoebe grapple with questions about family, trauma, and independence. Although Ivan tells the story, Phoebe's voice rings through the text as she divulges her own traumas through poetic monologues. The two reflect on the traumatic aftermath of revolution: torture at the hands of the KGB and each other. While Ivan refuses to talk about his pain, Phoebe describes her past through poetic monologues. Lutsyshyna's poetic form allows her to experiment with characterization and genre, creating her own category. Through her characters' vivid voices, Lutsyshyna creates a his- and her-story of Ukraine: a panoramic view of post-Soviet society and family life through social, political, and economic crises.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a Preceptor in Ukrainian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies