In recent years, Leo Strauss has achieved a posthumous success de scandal as the (purported) philosophical architect of neoconservatism. Strauss's works have been scrutinized by detractors and partisans to determine whether he bears responsibility for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Amidst the clamor, however, more measured assessments are starting to emerge. Today, the most provocative appraisals of his work come from scholars in Jewish studies, as Leora Batnitzky's fascinating book attests. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Batnitzky seeks to establish Strauss's contribution to modern Jewish thought, but her argument for his importance as a Jewish thinker also reframes the vexed question of his legacy for American politics. She offers a nonpolemical, non-Straussian defense of Leo Strauss. In many ways, her portrait of Strauss as a philosophical skeptic and political moderate resonates with that of Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (2006). However, Batnitzky departs from Smith (and, indeed, from most readers of Strauss) when she hails Strauss as the most ardent philosophical defender of Jewish revelation in the modern period.

Batnitzky arrives at this contrarian position by reading Strauss not through the lens of the Iraq war but within the context of Weimar Jewish intellectuals. When we examine him within his Weimar cohort, Batnitzky argues, Emmanuel Levinas emerges as his natural interlocutor. Although most contemporary readers would figure Strauss and Levinas as fierce antagonists (Strauss a neoconservative patriarch, Levinas a darling of the postmodern Left), Batnitzky insists that they share a philosophical project. Specifically, both aim “to speak with authority about morality” and vindicate conceptions of human nature after the Nazi genocide, and in the wake of Martin Heidegger's pronouncements regarding the end of metaphysics (p. 9). Batnitzky discerns striking formal similarities between the projects of Strauss and Levinas, although she argues that they ultimately disagree on “the status of modern philosophy,” which has profound implications for their respective political outlooks (p. 4). Although Batnitzky stresses the importance of interpreting Strauss and Levinas through the Weimar lens, her method is not primarily contextual. Rather, the majority of the book is devoted to deft, intricate analyses of dense philosophical texts. She displays formidable erudition, situating Strauss and Levinas not only with respect to one another but also within the august line of predecessors whom their texts incessantly quote (e.g., Plato, Maimonides, Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig).

Batnitzky's inspired juxtaposition yields surprising results: Strauss emerges as an exemplary skeptic whose insights into the theologico-political predicament “should be the starting point for Jewish political thinking in the late twentieth century,” while Levinas is exposed as “philosophically incoherent and politically dangerous” (pp. xxii, 85). Batnitzky arrives at this contrarian verdict by examining their divergent responses to a shared insight: Both recognize that philosophy cannot disprove or discredit the claims of Jewish revelation. The apparent impregnability of revelation leads Strauss to a skeptical insistence on philosophy's limitations. For him, philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other, nor can their claims be harmonized. Rather, politics sustains the productive tension between them, coordinating their competing claims and imposing limits on both. In this sense, Batnitzky argues, Strauss's politics are resolutely anti-utopian. Strauss denies that philosophy alone can direct social and political life, and thereby reserves a central role for religion in public life. He is not, as most have argued, an elitist who endorses rule by philosopher-kings who disseminate salutary myths (i.e., religion) to pacify the vulgar. Rather, he offers a philosophically and politically cogent defense of Jewish revelation (his personal atheism notwithstanding).

If Batnitzky celebrates Strauss's philosophical skepticism, she deplores Levinas's philosophical confidence. She offers an idiosyncratic reading of Levinas designed to puncture his (in her view) inflated critical reputation. On Batnitzky's view, he is not a postmodern apostle of Otherness; rather, he is the latest exponent of a dogmatic, modern, and expressly (post-)Christian conception of philosophy. Indeed, Levinas subscribes to the very modern doctrines—such as the existence of a “separate, independent, indeed atheistic self”—that his postmodern champions abhor (p. 29). His fealty to the modern project leads him to an inflated, and problematic, assessment of philosophy's political purchase. Whereas Strauss insists that revelation limits philosophy's purview, Levinas believes that philosophy can “fully articulate the meaning of humanity at large and in this sense direct social and political life,” without input from revelation (p. 50). Batnitzky taxes Levinas with a “messianic faith in philosophy,” a faith which ensnares its adherents in political pitfalls that (supposedly) elude the skeptical (p. 77).

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas is a sophisticated, accomplished book that manages to reframe central debates in two fields (Jewish studies and political theory) and yields novel insights into the work of two major theorists. Batnitzky's defense of Strauss is spirited and, for the most part, plausible. However, one begins to suspect that Levinas has been denied a fair shake. The author appears unduly critical of Levinas and unduly credulous when it comes to Strauss. Throughout the book, she tries to reconstruct “what Strauss might say” when confronted with Levinas's messianic claims for philosophy (p. 42). Yet she never performs the thought experiment in reverse—she never reconstructs a Levinasian critique of Strauss. Although she reads Levinas against the grain, exposing unwitting implications of his thought, she takes Strauss's claims at face value, accepting his monolithic and reductionist categories (e.g., Jewish revelation, the theologico-political predicament) without hesitation.

This curious refusal to interrogate Strauss leads Batnitzky to inflate his significance for modern Jewish thought and, more importantly, to overlook political liabilities of his skepticism. She repeatedly asserts the (unspecified) political dangers of Levinas's confidence in philosophy, dangers from which Strauss's skepticism ostensibly insulates him. But in the one instance where she adduces concrete evidence of Levinas's political failings—the case of his “fanatical” Zionism—it is unclear whether Straussian skepticism guarantees more palatable results (p. 141). Batnitzky insists that Levinas's notorious comments about the Palestinians are not, as most have argued, inconsistent with his political theory, but rather represent its logical culmination—for Levinas's conflation of politics with ethics licenses a religious understanding of the State of Israel: “Zionism became for Levinas not a political solution but a religious enterprise” (p. 152). By contrast, Batnitzky trusts that Strauss's pragmatic political Zionism (which asserts the importance of a Jewish homeland but denies that a Jewish state can solve the Jewish problem in any ultimate sense) proves more hospitable to Palestinians: “Ironically, Strauss's moderate politics, which seeks the common good and practices moderation, may have greater potential to recognize ‘the other’ than does Levinas's” (p. 162). But, as Israeli history demonstrates, political moderation need not produce an embrace of the Other—it can just as easily justify “pragmatic” measures (like the security fence) that further disenfranchise the Other. Indeed, throughout the history of Zionism, messianic aspirations and security concerns have coincided to justify expansionist policies that oppress the Other.

When it comes to concrete political questions, it is not clear whether the skeptical Strauss is any less dangerous than the dogmatic Levinas (or the dogmatic Strauss, for that matter).