Reason, Revelation, and Leo Strauss’s Jewish Commitments

The German Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) sought in his many works both to reanimate and to transform the study of the Western political tradition. Using her own assessment of Strauss’s career, as well as one written by Milton Himmelfarb in 1974, as her points of departure, Leora Batnitzky clears up some common misconceptions about his ideas and delves into what he saw as the primary tension in Western philosophy: that between reason and revelation. She then explores the distinctively Jewish aspects of his understanding of revelation, and suggests that he believed Judaism and Islam, in contradistinction to Christianity, shared much in their approach to law and revelation. (Interview by Alan Rubenstein. Audio, 34 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)