Defending Judaism in a Postmodern Age

In his 1930 book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, the great scholar of political thought Leo Strauss argues that the choice between religion and reason “is ultimately not theoretical but moral.” His aim, writes Jonathan Yudelman, “is to persuade rationalists to take religion seriously.” But at the same time, Strauss’s formulation challenges religious belief, and specifically Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his and Spinoza’s youths. A number of Jewish thinkers take up this challenge in a recent collection of essays titled Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith. Reviewing this exercise in “the lost literary genre of religious apologia,” Yudelson writes: