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June 12, 2025

Leo Strauss and His American Legacy

The German Jew who tried to reshape the study of politics.

For Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson, the Shoah was a formative experience, one that they kept coming back to in their writings, and, it seems, in their more private thoughts. How could it not be? It was also a formative experience for those who barely escaped. Among them was the German Jewish scholar Leo Strauss, who was formed intellectually by the rich ferment of Weimar philosophy, only to see one of the thinkers who had influenced him the most, Martin Heidegger, embrace Nazism and anti-Semitism.

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