New Books Network

Joel Dinerstein's The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (SUNY Press, 2026) is a tragicomic memoir of a dysfunctional, working-class Brooklyn Jewish family that illuminates both the vitality of urban life in the twentieth century and the social turmoil of white flight. As a child of immigrants born to older parents, Dinerstein has a unique perspective on four generations--from his grandparents escaping Russia's pogroms to his parents' embattled marriage to his older Boomer siblings (split between feminist and Republican politics) to his own hippie hopes. As a white teenager in majority Black public schools, Dinerstein's firsthand experience led to his academic career as a scholar of race and music. Yet his family fits no paradigm of Jewish success due to a father with rage and gambling problems, resulting in the four siblings escaping early to the Brooklyn streets. As a family growing up with a diasporic identity, the Dinersteins provide a primer of ethnic Jewish culture through iconic scenes: a selfish Seder, a chaotic Bar Mitzvah, a videotaped bris, an allergy attack at Dachau, a staring contest with the Rebbe. Most of all, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews is a chronicle of lost worlds.

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When an election turns violent and neither side will concede, why is the usual answer to put both sides in the same government?
Alex Noyes has spent nearly two decades asking whether that reflex works. Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa out in 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania Press, draws on more than 120 interviews with senior politicians and stakeholders in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Togo to give an unsettling answer.
Power sharing can advance democratic reform, but only when two conditions hold: inclusive politics among the parties, and outside enforcers willing to hold them to the deal. Both are rare. And even where the deal ends the killing, it rewards a losing incumbent with unearned power and sets a precedent.
In our conversation, Noyes explains why more than 600 such pacts have been struck since the Cold War, what the neglected Togo case reveals, and why he argues these arrangements should almost never be used after election violence.
Against the scholarly consensus, Noyes finds these pacts can deliver real democratic reform, but only under conditions that rarely hold, and always at the cost of a compromised start. The costs outweigh the gains, and policymakers should stop defaulting to the model.
Our guest is Alex Noyes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2016). They discuss how the climate and ecological crisis often confronts workers with the impossible choice between the end of the month and the end of the world, but how this choice between jobs and environment is not as zero-sum as it is usually represented. Lorenzo explains how people living near toxic industries often lose both jobs and the environment, how this takes different forms in different parts of the world, and how new solidarities can emerge that could save livelihoods and nature.
Guest:
Lorenzo Feltrin is a post-doctoral researcher at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice, working on a Marie Curie Global Fellowship titled "Labour and Ecology in an International Perspective: Porto Marghera in the Phosphates Archipelago". Between 2021 and 2024 he worked at the University of Birmingham.
Presenter:
Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of an upcoming research project on “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (funded by the EU under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Transcript here

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There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”

In How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prizing-winning author Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.

How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok.
Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between Great Powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan’s empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, Great Power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization, with liberal democracy on the march and national chauvinism seemingly in retreat. But events of the past decade have made one thing abundantly clear: The Great Powers are back.
In The Return of the Great Powers (Basic Books, 2026), renowned historian Brendan Simms offers a new history of the rise, fall, and return of the Great Powers in our time.  He shows that over the past ten years or so, the major global actors have already resumed making decisions based on geopolitical rather than global economic considerations.

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