My guest this week is Michael Curtis  a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political science  at Rutgers University.  He is highly regarded as an expert in several fields--political theory, comparative government, European politics and the Middle East.  Our topic today will be his fascinating book, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India, and how historical perspectives give us insights into today’s problems in that vital area.

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Among his approximately 30 books a few should be singled out as being particularly important and influential. His most recent book Verdict on Vichy, 2004 (published in the UK, USA, Italy, and Czech Republic) examined the degree to which the French legal and administrative system, the Church, and individuals in different walks of life collaborated with the Nazis who occupied France between 1940 and 1944. He reviewed the careers of those persons indicted for crimes against humanity, and the complex aryanisation process which requisitioned Jewish goods and property.  His analysis of the rise of anti-democratic and antisemitic ideology in France after the Dreyfus affair in a book called Three Against the Third Republic is considered the definitive study of this era in early 20th century French political history.

Other books include Totalitarianism, a study of  the 20th century European totalitarian regimes, and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World.  The latter book is a collection based on the papers delivered at a groundbreaking conference Professor Curtis organized in the 1980s.  This book continues to be referred to today as laying out some of the most important theory about the origins, rise, and persistence of antisemitism throughout the world.

In addition, Professor Curtis is considered an expert on the Middle East.  His many books on this area of the world cover a number of subjects.  He was one of the first to discuss the tangled web of the interconnections between religion and politics in the Muslim world in Religion and Politics in the Middle East.  Other significant books on the Middle East include Israel: Social Structure and Change and Israel in the Third World.  Professor Curtis is the author, as well, of textbooks that cover political theory (The Great Political Theories, a book first published forty years ago is still in print today with steady sales), comparative government, and European political institutions including the European Union.  These textbooks are used throughout the United States.  One is currently in its fifth edition.

Professor Curtis has been an activist as well as a scholar.  For many years, he was the president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East and editor of the Middle East Review.  As such he was often called upon by the press and television for comments as problems arose in the Middle East conflict over the last decades. He has traveled widely, in all the Western European countries including a year in Paris, as well as visits to Russia, Croatia, Israel, Korea, Japan, and Australia.

Professor Curtis was born in London in 1923 and educated at the London School of Economics, where he got a degree with first class honors. He came to the United States and obtained a doctorate at Cornell University in political science.  In addition to his years at Rutgers, he has taught at Cornell University, Yale University, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Massachusetts, University of Bologna, and Connecticut College, and given lectures at hundreds of institutions.  He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, is married, and has two sons and six grandchildren.