Other works I see as indispensable include Barbara Tuchman, The Bible and the Sword (on Christian efforts to assist in returning the Jews to Israel); David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (on the creation of the borders in the Middle East today); Joseph Soloveitchik, Kol Dodi Dofek (on the relationship between Torah and Israel); Michael Oren, Six Days of War; and Shai Agnon, Only Yesterday (a novel about the beginnings of the modern Zionist settlement in Palestine).
What books might people be surprised to find on your bookshelves?
I have a special section on a bottom shelf for Nazi writers, including Hitler, Heidegger, and Schmitt. Many scholars today, including many Jews, feel there are parts of the Nazi-German school of thought that can be rehabilitated and put to benign use in the classroom. I think this is a terrible mistake. By seeing how the supposedly benign parts fit into the bloodthirsty whole, we have a hope of recognizing how dangerous they really are.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or most personally meaningful?
My best book is one that hasn’t been published yet. It’s tentatively called Human Nature. It is an account of the basic operations of the human mind and how they work together to produce what we recognize as human thought and action.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
Overrated: Everything by Kant and his modern imitators, including especially John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Also overrated was Cristopher Clark’s hugely acclaimed recent history of the onset of World War I, The Sleepwalkers. 550 pages of painfully fine detail, but in the end I came away with exactly the same view of the subject that I had learned in 11th grade history class.
What book hasn’t been written that you’d like to read?
A history of the influence and impact of Jewish ideas on the Western world.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
The Vedas (Hindu scripture).
What do you plan to read next?
Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking.
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(format and questions modeled after those ofThe New York Times’s popular “By the Book” interviews)