Abstract
Looking at the flurry of recent books on Leo Strauss, one cannot help feeling that Strauss has arrived in the United States once again, only this time with considerable fanfare. Since Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987), Strauss has been taken increasingly seriously as a conservative political thinker and has been received as such by both friends and foes of his work. Strauss was, indeed, one of the most brilliant critics of modern conceptions of philosophy; he felt that, contrary to the consensus among liberal Jewish thinkers, an authentically Jewish concept of revelation would need to privilege the law; and he claimed that imbuing philosophy and politics with salvific (or utopian) qualities may have set us on the disastrous course of twentieth-century totalitarianism. What is poignant about this project is the broader question it raises for Jewish thought today. Since 1948, and with the exception of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism, Jewish thought can no longer be driven by the experience of exile. Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion, published 1965. [...]the important and influential five-volume series on the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (1995-2004), edited by Kenneth Hart Green. 4. Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion, published 1965. [...]the important and influential five-volume series on the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (1995-2004), edited by Kenneth Hart Green. 4.