Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after exposure to the wider world, he abandoned the faith of his youth.

Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidism (Temple University Press, 2026) is Newfield's poignant and hopeful memoir about exiting Orthodoxy. He recounts asserting his individuality and taking the radical step of shaving his beard. Reflective about his upbringing, Newfield is open to and curious about a world beyond Brooklyn while also maintaining his profound bond with his family and Jewish tradition. He writes candidly about his emotional, intellectual, and social experiences in and out of the Lubavitch community.

From pivotal moments of devastation, including the illness and death of his younger brother and of his revered spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to moments of joyful resolve, including the decision to pursue a doctorate and marry a non-Orthodox Jew, Newfield takes readers on his moving and impactful journey.

Zalman Newfield is Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple). Visit him online at zalmannewfield.com.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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How have jobs changed in the last 150 years? In The Division of Rationalized Labor (Harvard UP, 2025) Michelle Jackson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University examines the original theories about the division of labour and explains why many predictions about the future of work did not emerge. Drawing on detailed case studies of medicine, law, education and manufacturing the book charts the intertwined rise of the sciences, the expansion of occupational responsibilities, and the increasing complexity of work. Theorizing the paradox of specialization, alongside detailed empirical analysis, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and for anyone interested in understanding work and occupations today.

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Is the home still a site for feminist resistance? In Feminisms and Domesticity in Times of Crisis: The Rise of the Austerity Celebrity Jessica Martin, a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, examines the rise of postfeminist celebrities in the era of covid and the cost-of-living crisis. Drawing on 4 case studies, the book demonstrates how much of the seemingly feminist celebrity activism of recent years has reinforced and justified social inequalities. The book explains and contextualises many current media issues, from the ‘trad wife’ and nostalgic gender politics, to the complicated politics of mumsnet, blogging and business coaches. Offering a nuanced account of the possibilities for alternatives, whilst cautioning that even explicitly anti-poverty feminist campaigning is constrained by a reactionary media landscape, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary life.

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In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of today’s media landscape, revealing how popular entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion in an increasingly news-avoiding nation. Drawing on an eclectic array of original data, Dr. Eunji Kim demonstrates how, amid a dazzling array of media choices, many Americans simply are not consuming the news.

Instead, millions flock to entertainment programs that showcase real-life success stories, such as American Idol, Shark Tank, and MasterChef. Dr. Kim examines how shows like these leave viewers confoundingly optimistic about the prospects of upward mobility, promoting a false narrative of rugged individualism and meritocracy that contradicts what is being reported in the news. By taking seriously what people casually watch every day, The American Mirage shows how rags-to-riches programs perpetuate the myth of the American Dream, glorifying the economic winners, fostering tolerance for income inequality, and dampening support for redistributive policies that could improve people’s lives.

Our guest is: Dr. Eunji Kim, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. As a political communication scholar, she primarily studies the impact of media content on mass attitudes and political behavior. She is the author of The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy. Her research explores a range of topics, and has been published in many leading journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and editor for academics. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.com.

Playlist for listeners:

Understanding Disinformation

100 Years of Radio in South Africa

You Have More Influence Than You Think

Black Girls and How We Fail Them

Live From The Underground

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Marxists have an obvious interest in understanding social movements. Less obvious, even with the voluminous theoretical archives at hand, is how to pull their various forms together into a cohesive theory of collective action. While one can see images on the news of strikes, riots, protests, coups, and uprisings, and draw occasional connections between them, turning this vast array of phenomena into a cohesive theory that can be built upon remains a challenge, but it's one my guests today, Augustin Santella and Adrian Piva have risen to. Assembling a number of essays from scholars from all over the world, their book, Marxism, Social Movements and Collective Action (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) tries to understand the various forms collective struggle can take, all the while chasing the underlying logic that might unite them. While the book will not be the final word on the topic, its essays will prove rich resources for those looking for both empirical examples and philosophical speculations on the nature of collective struggle.

Augustin Santella and Adrian Piva are both professors at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states.

For more than a decade, Dr. Alexis M. Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and public squares of cities once under communist rule, from Berlin in the west to Vladivostok in the east, recording thousands of cases of critical and satirical political street art and cataloging these artworks linguistically and thematically across space and time. Complemented by first-hand interviews with leading artists, activists, and politicians from across the region, Post-Soviet Graffiti provides theoretical reflection on public space as a site for political action, a semiotic reading of signs and symbols, and street art as a form of text.

The book answers the question of how we conceptualize avenues of dissent under authoritarian rule by showing how contemporary graffiti functions not only as a popular public aesthetic, but also as a mouthpiece of political sentiment, especially within the post-Soviet region and post-communist Europe. A purposefully anonymous and accessible artform, graffiti is an effective tool for circumventing censorship and expressing political views. This is especially true for marginalized populations and for those living in otherwise closed and censored states.

Post-Soviet Graffiti reveals that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them.

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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Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial reading and criticism. It critically examines the history and ongoing influence of colonialism and imperialism in postcolonial cultures and texts. The volume seeks to address the crucial question of how to read postcolonial literatures closely and comparatively, particularly through the lenses of decolonisation and anticolonialism. Through rubrics such as migration, ecology, trauma, minorities and futurity, Postcolonialism Now engages with close readings of films, graphic novels, fiction, theatre and poetry from across the globe.

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Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in the making, or unmaking, of state authority and legitimacy. Looking at roadblocks as a kind of infrastructural empire that existed before the Europeans first arrived in Africa, Schouten develops a new framework to understand the ways in which supply chain capitalism thrives in places of non-conventional logistical capacity, to reframe how state theory fails to capture the nature of statehood and local authority in Central Africa. Schouten calls out governments, the UN and other international actors, to highlight how control of roadblocks translates into control over mineral, territory or people. No analysis of the drivers of conflict anywhere in the world is complete without consideration of Peer Schouten’s groundbreaking book, Roadblock Politics.

At the end of the interview, Schouten recommends two books: Mintz’s (1986) Sweetness of Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Labatut’s (2021) When We Cease to Understand the World. Thomson recommends the CBC podcast Nothing is Foreign.

Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people.

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Linda Connolly is a professor of sociology at Maynooth University, with research focusing on gender, Irish society, family studies, migration, and Irish studies. Dr Tina O'Toole is a literary scholar with research expertise in Irish and diasporic writing, gender studies, and the history of sexualities; she is a senior lecturer at the University of Limerick.

In this interview, they discuss their well-known text Documenting Irish Feminisms, first published in 2005 and now re-released.

Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave (Arlen House, 2022) is a wide-ranging volume that traces the development of second-wave feminism in Ireland. The work draws upon a diversity of rare primary sources, including documents, photos, and publications. Connolly and O’Toole explore several themes in Irish feminist politics from the 1970s to the 1990s, including the emergence of pioneering feminist groups and organizations; reproductive rights and activism; the legal system and the state; the development of cultural projects; feminism and Northern Ireland; lesbian activism; and class and education. This book is an invaluable resource in the fields of history, sociology, politics, Irish studies, and women’s studies.

Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh.

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Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Brussels, Geneva or Dubai. Many were discriminated against on the French job market, or stigmatized simply because of their religion or the sound of their names. Whether devout or not, they felt unloved and unwanted in France, but abroad they have found a sense of peace and fulfilment that their native country failed to give them.
Based on extensive original research, France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims (Polity, 2025) by Dr. Olivier Esteves, Dr. Alice Picard, and Dr. Julien Talpin sheds new light on the silent and largely unacknowledged flight abroad of French Muslims. It explores their motivations, their experiences in France and abroad, and their sense of Frenchness, torn between gratitude and bitterness. This book isn't just about an unreported brain-drain - it is also about the deleterious effects of Islamophobia in a country that balks at the very mention of the concept. And it highlights a pressing issue that many nations with Muslim minorities need to confront.

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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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology