I should explain my interest which has a dual nature. First, most of my politics from the 60s came from Jewish friends, radical, liberal or vague left. Their political views came from their parents....which means the generation who grew up in 1920s, then hit the Depression and WWII, etc.
David Horowitz is a couple of years older than me and writes about his turn away during the Pathers and his parents communist politics etc. So, I was around for all that, and it struck me as mighty strange. What was this really about? Problems with daddy. Norman Podhoretz was another, only from my youngest step-father's generation.
So some of that set the stage for going after the necons, and I came across Leo Strauss. He turned out to be a much more interesting figure than I ever imagined. He was very active in his first incarnation during the 1920s early Zionist movements. He wrote for a Zionist magazine and had a fellowship at the Jewish Studies Institute in Berlin under Julius Guttmann. I had to go through Guttmann's famous book Philosophies of Judaism. This gets to Herman Cohen and Ernst Carrirer. I was in a world I really knew nothing about---German Jewish intellectual circles during Weimar. This is great historical reading.
But LS essays didn't make much political sense. So I had to research back a little Zionist history. This got really interesting because it deals with the issue of a national minority, formally emancipated, but undergoing a familar cultural crisis---reforming an identity. On the German side, from Thomas Mann's work you can read a very similar build up of nationalism out of mythological or pop cult worlds of the issues of the day. There must have been some disconnect going on about who was a German, anybody who spoke German? And what was German culture exactly---the writers and philosophers, the painters and poets? You can also read these identity issues in Arendt and Heidegger.
So all that forms a really interesting way to look at the US today. Who the fuck is an American and what does that mean? So we land in the culture wars, the wars over immigration policy, the whole nasty fur ball.
Anyway, from my point of view, a lot of this is also something of a comedy of errors. My identity and its roots trace back to LA, which is practically speaking, pretty much like saying I am from no where. LA has a habit of bulldozing whole areas and rebuilding them so a lot of places I loved probably don't exist anymore. It's not much to build a nationalism on, or a cultural identity, or even a personal identity, spirit or nature or style. These have to be invented as they are constantly in the popular culture. I can say I am from the 1960s and that seems to have some meaning. But I didn't know it was the 1960s at the time----and since its history has been under constant re-write, re-invention.
So this brings up the question of authencity. Are you true to yourself, your people, your country? These were issues that Strauss dealt with in his early work. As somebody who can't really identify with even a city, let alone a people or a nation, I also take a very bemused look at all this.
One of the weird things about Berkeley, is nobody is from Berkeley (except my kid and grand kids). Everybody is from somewhere else. So, technically the idea of Berkeley is pretty funny, because there is no such place. It has to be re-invented over and over. How that happens is a bit of a mystery to me. All I can say is thank the city planning dept that has refused permits to big developers---so the place still looks pretty much the same.
This invention business is wrapped with the neocons and their academic wing, who are constantly re-writing US history and politics. That's the importance of Strauss. He was re-writing the political philosophy, by re-interpreting it along authoritarian and hierarchical lines---which has the effect of erasing the Enlightenment....and liberalism
They are not the only ones. There was a story the other day about the Texas School Board, re-writing their public school history standards so as to minimize the influence of Mexico and Mexican and Native Americans.
This history business is really important for political and cultural affairs. It's a real problem in this country because nobody reads history. They may like historical fiction, but then most of that is pretty mythological stuff---by design of course.
Well, so not to ramble on, the above is where I am coming from. I can't remember if I posted this or not but I discovered the Sholom Sand's book on Juan Cole's blog. Cole cited it in a long rant about who `owns' Jerusalem to counter Netanyahu propaganda speech the other day. Cole essay is here:
http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/top-ten-reasons-east-jerusalem-does-not.html
So, I'll probably have to get the book to see.
CG