The German-American philosopher Leo Strauss is best known for his emphasis on esoteric readings of the great works of Western political philosophy, his writing about natural rights, and his insistence that modern scholars can recover a tradition of political rationalism from classical antiquity. But he was also a proud Jew and Zionist, whose thinking about Judaism was deeply intertwined with his thinking about the fundamental problems of political theory. His work thus provides a springboard for a recent collection of essays titled Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith. Nathan Laufer writes in his review:

In his preface to the English edition of Benedict Spinoza’s “Critique of Religion,” Strauss made the somewhat surprising claim that Jewish Orthodox belief in Divine revelation was as defensible as Spinoza’s unbelief in revelation. For Strauss, neither believers nor nonbelievers in divine revelation could know that they were correct; neither could credibly argue that the position that each of them espoused was the true one. However, Orthodox believers had as good a case for their belief in the Divine revelation of the Torah and the Orthodox practice that followed from it, as Spinoza and his secular followers had in their refusal to believe in Divine revelation and their resultant secular beliefs and lifestyle.

In stating so, Strauss pushed back against the academic mainstream of his time that relied on Spinoza and his intellectual heirs to mock Orthodox belief in Divine revelation and the tenets of traditional religion as just so much archaic superstition.

Although Strauss was raised in a nominally Orthodox home in Germany, he himself was not an Orthodox Jew. Yet this essay had a profound influence on many of its readers including the lead editor of this volume, Jeffrey Bloom. When, shortly after graduating from college, Bloom began taking his first, tentative steps towards Orthodox Jewish observance, Strauss’s essay helped to launch his spiritual journey on rational grounds.

After the passage of a couple of decades, Bloom asked himself whether Strauss’ argument, persuasive as it was for him as a young man, was the best argument that could be made today in defense of Orthodox Judaism. Was the best that can be said about contemporary Orthodoxy is that it was no less reasonable than contemporary secularism? Or was the case for Orthodox Judaism today a much stronger one than the one that Strauss posited over a half century ago? To help him answer that question he turned to seventeen prominent Orthodox Jewish scholars, including his co-editors, Rabbi Alec Goldstein and Rabbi Gil Student, to analyze, respond to, and build on Strauss’s argument.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”