Most Americans can recite the names of famous generals and historic battles. Some can also name champions of nonviolence like Martin Luther King Jr., or recall the struggles for peace and justice that run like a thread through U.S. history. But little attention is paid to the intellectual tradition of nonviolence. Ira Chernus surveys the evolution of this powerful idea from the Colonial Era up to today, focusing on representative movements (Anabaptists, Quakers, Anarchists, Progressives) and key individuals (Thoreau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Day, A.J. Muste, King, Barbara Deming), including non-Americans like Mohandas Gandhi or Thich Nhat Hanh, who have helped form the idea of nonviolence in the United States. American Nonviolence offers an essential guide for both students and activists.

After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.

"This book takes an incisive look at the stories we are told -- and tell ourselves -- about evil forces and American responses. Chernus pushes beyond political rhetoric and media cliches to examine psychological mechanisms that freeze our concepts of the world." Norman Solomon, author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death In his new book Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, Ira Chernus tackles the question of why U.S. foreign policy, aimed at building national security, has the paradoxical effect of making the country less safe and secure. His answer: The "war on terror" is based not on realistic appraisals of the causes of conflict, but rather on "stories" that neoconservative policymakers tell about human nature and a world divided between absolute good and absolute evil. The root of the stories is these policymakers' terror of the social and cultural changes that swept through U.S. society in the 1960s. George W. Bush and the neoconservatives cast the agents of change not simply as political opponents, but as enemies or sinners acting with evil intent to destroy U.S. values and morals-that is, as "monsters" rather than human beings. The war on terror transfers that plot from a domestic to a foreign stage, making it more appealing even to those who reject the neoconservative agenda at home. Because it does not deal with the real causes of global conflict, it harms rather than helps the goal of greater national security.

"This book takes an incisive look at the stories we are told -- and tell ourselves -- about evil forces and American responses. Chernus pushes beyond political rhetoric and media cliches to examine psychological mechanisms that freeze our concepts of the world." Norman Solomon, author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death In his new book Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, Ira Chernus tackles the question of why U.S. foreign policy, aimed at building national security, has the paradoxical effect of making the country less safe and secure. His answer: The "war on terror" is based not on realistic appraisals of the causes of conflict, but rather on "stories" that neoconservative policymakers tell about human nature and a world divided between absolute good and absolute evil. The root of the stories is these policymakers' terror of the social and cultural changes that swept through U.S. society in the 1960s. George W. Bush and the neoconservatives cast the agents of change not simply as political opponents, but as enemies or sinners acting with evil intent to destroy U.S. values and morals-that is, as "monsters" rather than human beings. The war on terror transfers that plot from a domestic to a foreign stage, making it more appealing even to those who reject the neoconservative agenda at home. Because it does not deal with the real causes of global conflict, it harms rather than helps the goal of greater national security.

For eight years President Dwight Eisenhower claimed to pursue peace and national security. Yet his policies entrenched the United States in a seemingly permanent cold war, a spiraling nuclear arms race, and a deepening state of national insecurity. Ira Chernus uncovers the key to this paradox in Eisenhower's unwavering commitment to a consistent way of talking, in private as well as in public, about the cold war rivalry. Contrary to what most historians have concluded, Eisenhower never aimed at any genuine rapprochement with the Soviet Union. He discourse always assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, making national insecurity a permanent way of life. The "peace" he sought was only an endless process of managing apocalyptic threats, a permanent state of "apocalypse management," intended to give the United States unchallenged advantage in every arena of the cold war. The goal and the discourse that supported it were inherently self-defeating. Yet the discourse is Eisenhower's most enduring legacy, for it has shaped U.S. foreign policy ever since, leaving us still a national insecurity state.