The Harvard Brief

The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves – in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally.

Join Kenneth Moss in conversation with Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein for a discussion on this new publication and the history it unveils.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on March 2, 2022.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European
intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of
articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical
works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear
writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis
digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm
was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was
embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow
intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including
Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel,
E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.

In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal
traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by
exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to
uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his
pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern
history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first
substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed,
The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into
the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in
conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates
globally.

The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. In Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. A. J. Murphy explores the profound consequences of translating military structures of command, logistics, and warfare into capitalist terms.In the realm of budgeting and finance, defense reformers refashioned the supply process as a buy-and-sell transaction between units, requiring officers to express their need for equipment and labor in dollar terms. Bureaucrats embraced Taylorist work measurement to supervise everything from clerical filing to the production of massive weapons systems. The services even engaged management consultants to establish officer-training academies modeled on the Harvard Business School.After the Vietnam War, many military leaders pushed back, questioning “managerialism” and calling for a return to traditional concepts of command. Civilian critics also chimed in, protesting the callousness of the business-minded secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who famously measured success and failure in body counts. By this time, however, the language and values of management had thoroughly infiltrated the military’s institutional structure and daily operations. As Pentagon Capitalism makes clear, the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy along the lines of a for-profit firm durably altered the experience of military work and facilitated the lasting privatization of US national security.

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.

We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested
reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher
principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what
springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities:
cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly
mowed quads.

The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard
University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at
the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each
chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk,
paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate
connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its
evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of
Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in
otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at
postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows
how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on
generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture.
Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social
space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before
worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial
intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor
would become more important than research and education, that the allure
of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline.

A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that,
even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable.
The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone,
brick, and steel are here to stay.

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.

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026) offers
a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan
(794–1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous
dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious
lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy.

Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the
very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries,
prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to
later forms like noh and kyōgen, these performances formed a dynamic
cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence
through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography,
Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in
Heian Japan.

Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance
and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights
into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present.