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Agreed. I am sort of working along that route, but I am still in the reading stages, the spade work.
Let me tell you the spade work is very, very heavy lifting. There is a reason nobody has done a serious intellectual biography of Strauss. It starts with understanding that Strauss was a serious philosophy student and worked under giants like Cassirer and Heidegger to begin with, and in a period that was both a German and Jewish renaissance. The level of analysis is very high and requires a huge amount of erudition. It also requires following the wild patch work of intellectual currents in Weimar.
So far the way I am trying to approach it is to read Strauss, then read who Strauss was writing about, then read his contemporaries who were writing about the same topics, then go back and reconstruct the intellectual events and history that surround these writings, then go back and read the history of the people who Strauss is writing about, then finally re-read Strauss again.
As you can tell at the moment I am trying to learn the nuances of Zionists arguments and movements, which I don't really understand. If you feel like it, outline in crude terms what Jabotinshy is in relation to say Julius Guttmann.
Strauss had a fellowship under Guttmann and was writing for several different Jewish magazines---also I don't know the political bend of them either. These were Der Jude, Die judische Rundschau, and Der judische Student. Michael Zank's introduction is very good, but it lacks concrete political detail and presumes a knowledge of Zionism in the period that I lack.
Unfortunately, it is looking like Strauss's relationship to Zionism in all of its nuances in the period, is important to understand. The reason is that couched in this realm are the seeds to Strauss's later concept of the relationship between philosophy, religion, law, state, and social value.
What happens as far as I can tell is Strauss becomes very disillustioned with the Zionist movements in the late 20s, and returns to a more hermeneutic approach starting his research on Maimonides(?). His letters and exchanges with Carl Schmitt (somebody else I haven't read!) take place just after he drops out of the Zionist internal battles. This is where I have to re-read sections of Arendt to figure out where she stood at the time, since she is also dappling in Zionism at the same time.
Chuck Grimes