Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press,

In Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016), Dov Waxman, professor of political science, international affairs, and Israel studies at Northeastern University,

Eric Schickler is the author of Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 (Princeton University Press, 2016). Schickler is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California,

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious ...

In The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews (Princeton University Press, 2016), Michael Barnett, University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University,

George McGovern is largely remembered today for his dramatic loss to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign, yet he enjoyed a long career characterized by many remarkable achievements. In Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of Geor...

In The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016), Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University, explores the origin and development of the idea ...

Jennifer Beineke and Jason Rosenhouse‘s new book The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects: Research in Recreational Math (Princeton University Press, 2015) covers a multitude of topics and is in many ways as entertaining as the various subjects...

In Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton University Press, 2015), Todd Endelman looks across three centuries and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to examine the history of Jews who decided t...

In Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016), Robert Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of German at Ohio State University, evaluates the debate over whether famed German philosopher Fr...

Many are introduced to philosophy by way of a confrontation with the kind of radical skepticism associated with Rene Descartes: Might I right now be dreaming? Might everything I think I know be the product of some grand deception perpetrated by a malev...

In German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton University Press, 2016), John M. Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, examines the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry.

Urban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari(Princeton, 2015), ethnographer David Grazian tracks the competing missions of zoos as sit...

Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) interprets the New Deal as a massive but unstable ...

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press,

Romance. Crime. Mathematics. These things do not go together. Or do they? James D. Stein thinks they do, and he admirably shows us how in his wonderful collection of stories L.A. Math: Romance, Crime, and Mathematics in the City of Angels (Princeton Un...

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American pol...

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence.

Today I’m talking with Lynn Gamwell about Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2015). This book is a breathtaking combination of scholarship and beauty, tracing the interplay of mathematics and art throughout mankind’s h...

Winner of the 2015 American Anthropological Associations Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2014 JMEWS Book Award of the Association for Middle East Womens Studies,

In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the Israel-Palestine conflict....

What are the differences between religion, magic, and spirituality? Over time, these categories have been articulated in a variety of ways across differing cultures. However, many assume that the multiple understandings are merely derivative of western...

It is commonly thought that violence, injustice, and discrimination against religious minorities, especially in the Middle East, are a product of religious fundamentalism and myopia. Concomitantly, it is often argued,

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing.

We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the discipline has its roots in the Socratic activity of try...