David Kertzer received his J.D. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Yale University, where he was a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Scholar. He is the author of "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara," winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and "The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe." He has taught at Harvard Law School, UCLA Law School, and the University of California at Berkeley
Currently, he is a professor of history at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
I never want to see umbrellas around me." he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.David I. Kertzer
Ritual may be vital to reaction, but it is also the life blood of revolution.David I. Kertzer
