Author Interviews

Below are recent interviews with CUP authors. View a complete listing of past interviews.

Dana Eric Kaplan.: I argue that American Jews, like other Americans, have become much more interested in personal spirituality, and this has transformed American Judaism....

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Cloth, $34.50 / £24.00 446 pages , July 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-13728-7

Q: What’s wrong with morality?

Hans-Georg Moeller: People usually assume that morality is a good thing. It is generally believed that a moral person is somehow better than a person who is not moral and that a society which holds moral values in high esteem is better of than one which does not. I do not think that this is the case—and this is what the whole book is about. It is about pointing out the “sick” aspects of morality, about the “pathology of morality,” so to speak. I think that morality does not deserve to be valued as much as it is today.

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Paper, $24.50 / £17.00 224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-231-14509-1

Cloth, $79.50 / £55.00 224 pages , June 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-14508-4

Q: Is Social Security going to be there when I retire?

Mitchell Orenstein: Surprisingly, the answer is yes. After years of Republicans like Ralph Reed telling us that Social Security won’t be there when Americans retire, that the system is in deep crisis, etc., it turns out that they were entirely wrong. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that Social Security benefits are relatively stable and reliable. It's your 401(k) that may not be there for you when you retire.....

Read the entire interview with Mitchell Orenstein.

Paper, $18.00 / £12.50 138 pages
ISBN: 978-0-231-14695-1

Cloth, $55.00 / £38.00 138 pages , April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-14694-4

Ted Striphas: On the one hand, books and other printed materials exist—and for some, are becoming lost—in a media landscape more densely crowded than ever. On the other hand, printed books now enjoy an extraordinary prevalence and degree of accessibility, owing to the recent rise of big-box bookstores, internet bookselling, televisual book promotion, and the like. How could it be that books are dying and thriving all at once? This is the overarching question that the late age of print—both the idea and the book—addresses.

Read the full interview at Conversational Reading.

Cloth, $27.50 / £19.00 272 pages , May 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-14814-6

Marian Ronan: At the beginning of the 1960s, white ethnic American Catholics were poised to achieve the idealized way of life our immigrant forebears had struggled to attain. Many of us were also convinced that with Vatican II the democratic vision of the church we had long favored was going to become dominant. Yet by the end of the decade, the "American dream" had exploded into social conflict and the Vatican was fighting our much anticipated liberalization of the church with increasing ferocity.... Our losses were enormous.

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Cloth, $40.00 / £27.50 216 pages , May 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-14702-6

Bruce Gilley: To fall behind in meeting new standards of democracy, policy fairness, good governance, broadly shared development, or even cultural and social rejuvenation is to court legitimacy decline. I think France is the best example of this danger, a country that ranked 33rd out of my 72 states and that, as one can see, is constantly rocked by protests, violence, and broader social alienation. Legitimacy matters for every state, and my advice to policy makers, to quote one development economist who shares my view, is to “go out and get it.”

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Cloth, $34.50 / £24.00 336 pages , March 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-13872-7

Ami Pedahzur: Well, after a decade of studying terrorism and especially during the second Intifada with the long campaign of suicide attacks, I started asking myself the following question: If Israel is indeed such a superpower in counterterrorism as it wants the world to believe, why has terrorism against Israelis only intensified and become more deadly over the years?

Read the full interview with Ami Pedahzur.

Cloth, $27.50 / £19.00 232 pages , February 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-14042-3