[lbo-talk] Re: "One Palestine, Complete"

[Jeet Heer]

Chuck Grimes

> Any dirt anybody can add to Leo [Strauss's] activities in the Zionist
> organizations of the Weimar period---please feel free to contribute.
>

Leo Strauss was not just a regular Zionist -- as Chuck suggests, Strauss
thought that labour Zionism was weak tea. He was, at least for a time,
attracted to the extreme "revisionist" Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Strauss mentioned this once in one of his autobiographal essays (the
introduction to the reprint of his first book, on Spinoza, if I remember
correctly). But I haven't come across anything that talks about this at any
length -- what we really need is a good intellectual biography of Strauss --
alas, his disciples are adverse to that sort of analysis, and none of his
critics have done the necessary spade work. If I had a smart graduate
student that knew German, I would get them working on Strauss's bio. Jeet