Face to Face
Welcome to Face to Face where you will meet authors and activists,
playwrights and poets, pundits and politicians. Every few weeks a new interview will
appear in this space. You will be familiar with many of these people and their work, but
in our interviews we will bring a distinctive emphasis to bear. CLAL is specifically
interested in the multifarious ways in which Jewishness - Jewish concerns, values,
sensibilities, humor - gets expressed in the lives we lead and in the work we do, and in
how the contemporary meaning of Jewishness is being reshaped along the way.
In our interviews we will focus on these themes, with the aim of bringing to the fore
the sometimes overt but more often subtle Jewish meanings that are expressed by these
thinkers and creators in their work.
To access the Face to Face Archive, click here.
Our authors are especially interested in hearing your responses to what they have
written. So after reading, visit the Face to Face Discussion and join in conversation with
CLAL faculty and other readers.
Athens versus Jerusalem: An Interview with Stephen Elkin
By Shari Cohen
From its inception in 1999, the Jewish Public Forum was to be a different kind of
Jewish institution. Seeking to generate fresh thinking about the social, political and
cultural trends affecting ethnic and religious identity and community, it is an
unprecedented effort to broaden the conversation about the Jewish future by engaging
leading figures in the worlds of academia, business, the arts and public policy, most of
whom have not been involved in organized Jewish life.
One of the earliest, and most enthusiastic Jewish Public Forum participants is Stephen L.
Elkin, Professor of Government at the University of Maryland, Chair of the Executive Board
of PEGS (The Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society) and the Editor of the
PEGS journal, The Good Society. Professor Elkin is the author and editor of six
books, including City and Regime in the American Republic (University of Chicago
Press, 1987); Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions (Penn State
University Press, 1999); and over forty papers. He has served in an informal advisory role
to the Forum, offering insights from his think tank, PEGS a network of political
scientists, economists and political activists interested in a political science that
plays an active role in shaping a good society, alongside its academic role of analyzing
political phenomena.
In this interview with Shari Cohen, Ph.D., director of the Jewish Public Forum, he talks
about his lifelong commitment to moral theory -- and to a political science that is
engaged in the world -- as a mirror of the observant, learned Jewish life, which he did
not choose. Inspired by Leo Strauss, he talks about how he might begin to engage the
Jewish tradition alongside western political theory Jerusalem alongside Athens --
and he reflects upon his hopes for an evolving Judaism that goes beyond the synagogue.
SC: How do you think that your Jewish identity, however you want to define that, has
affected the choices youve made about your work?
SE: Well, I think Judaism has had a profound effect because it was something to which I
was clearly connected in some way, and of which I had direct experience, so it was present
to me in a way that, say, Islam was not. It posed a question for me right from the
beginning of my intellectual life as an adult, simply because there plainly were highly
gifted people who thought there was some kind of transcendent being. It became terribly
important to me right from the beginning to understand the relationship between that
belief that I didnt share, and what I was doing. This was particularly true because
there were people who held that belief whom I plainly admired. It became a question about
the value of a secular intellectual life versus the value of a life deeply embedded in
some kind of Jewish way of living. This led me to the idea that I needed to do a lot more
work in political and moral theory.
SC: Now when are we talking about here?
SE: Well, I think we are talking about from the beginning. But in a quite alive and real
way, for the last fifteen, twenty years. I wasnt on some kind of quest because
Im not put together that way. It was always right here, right in front of me all the
time. The understanding that there was this deeply serious alternative way of life made me
feel that I needed to believe strongly in what I was doing instead. What I was doing had
to be judged by the same standard of seriousness that a learned and believing Jews
life could be judged against. It always had to be directed at the same kinds of very
serious questions that I thought Judaism itself had kept in view. This is a complicated
way of saying what I suspect is true for lots of Jews: the vision of a deeply serious and
learned way of life was always a measure or a standard against which one had to think of
ones own life. In other words, what I was doing couldnt be the equivalent of
selling shoes, just a way to make a living, however attractive a way of making a living it
might be.
So a lot of the effect of Judaism on me is that it shaped how I evaluate my own life. I
have not been willing to do anything in my professional life that I didnt take to be
perfectly serious. I just didnt do the other stuff. I probably did the largest
single piece of survey research organized by and for which the money was raised by one
person. Twelve hundred respondents in ten English cities clustered in four neighborhoods
per citythats forty neighborhoods. Along with all of the data from each of the
respondents in the survey, I attached all of the data from the census about the character
of the neighborhooda huge data set. I wrote one article out of it and I stopped. I
said, This is really boring. I dont even know where the data is now.
SC: What caused you to begin on that project if it was going to become so tiresome?
SE: Because the survey part was actually ancillary to, or the first step in, answering a
question I still find really interesting: What effect does political leadership have on
what people say and do? The first thing you have to know in order to answer that is what
people are saying and doing. That was a really simple thing and, obviously, I should have
done it in a simple way. I dropped it when I realized I couldnt immediately go at
the questions that I thought were really important.
SC: You talked about moral theory. Can you be a little more specific about some of the
questions to which this led you?
SE: The beginning ones. Socrates. How should we live? How do we know whats good? Is
what we think is good for individuals the same as what we think is good for societies?
What makes for good societies or good political regimes? And if it isnt a good one,
what if anything can you do about it? Its only latterly and lately that I really
understood a basic piece of Judaism, which is that its not a religion, or only a
religion. It is literally a way of lifethat is, your whole life is structured around
it. What is significant in it and how the significance is shown and so forth is all there.
It is a very serious alternative to the life of a secular, justice-oriented individual
living in the world I live in. I take it that the alternatives are real and serious. My
life has largely consisted of trying to figure out how I got to the one I chose. In more
recent years, I have also been trying to determine what the alternative, which is Judaism,
would mean for me. I could never just not be a Jew. Maybe thats the simplest way of
saying it. I couldnt just say: The hell with this, Im done. Who are
those guys?
SC: Why is that?
SE: Because I believed, and believe even more so now, that people with enormous
intellectual and other kinds of gifts have come to a different conclusion.
SC: Are there any specific individuals who loom in your mind in that regard?
SE: Leo Strauss is one. For a long time, I knew Leo Strauss only as a distinguished
political theorist. But sometime in my late forties, I discovered that he was someone for
whom the question of Judaism was absolutely central, and for whom there was also a real
question about the relationship between both ancient and modern philosophy and Judaism.
That, in some sense, is what I was worrying about, but had no way to think aboutI
just didnt know enough. And since I had enormous respect for Strauss I thought,
Well, okay. It was through Strauss that I discovered there were people like
Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. I had always been puzzled, once I knew who Martin Buber
was, why he never went to synagogue. What was that all about? After all, my mother, that
paragon of Jewishness, had Martin Bubers books on her shelf. So I discovered, and
this is really the point, that there were people of enormous gifts who both knew the
western philosophical tradition and also took Judaism seriously. And when I discovered
this I was furiousno other word for it. The thing that finally did it for me was
reading Yitz Greenbergs The Third Great Cycle of Jewish History and
The Third Era. I said, Oh, thats what its about. Gee.
This is what I say to my wife -- who is the most morally serious person I know all
the time. She thinks not only that religion is the opiate of the masses, but that
its made them murderous morons. I say the best evidence for staying with the
question is that people with incredible gifts say there is something there. God knows
Im arrogant enough, but Im not that arrogant. I take it there is a real choice
and the choice is a very complicated, hard one in which people with enormous gifts have
come down on different sides and Im not satisfied with where I have ended up.
SC: Do you know when it was that you started to frame it that way to yourself?
SE: Yeah, I do actually. I had a terrible graduate education because, at Harvard, they did
not care if you died in your room. But the one thing that some of the faculty did for me
was to give me examples of first-rate minds who were morally serious. That doesnt
mean they were religious believers of any kind, but their writing was heavily directed, in
some sense, at making America a satisfactory society. In other words, I never got this
kind of scientific we study the world baloney. These were morally engaged
scholars. Probably the best example, though she is dead now, is Judith Sklar. For her,
doing political theory was the equivalent of going to synagogue. I wouldnt have been
able to say it then, but I think thats what was true. Thats the idea I got in
some kind of inchoate form.
SC: Did she articulate it that way?
SE: No. She was a woman of alarming seriousness. She had an easy way about her too, God
knows, or she never would have put up with me. But if I were to pick out a person who was
the template of someone for whom studying and reading and writing were the most serious
things they could do with their lives, it would have been her. And not serious in an
abstract way, but serious as in I was born in Riga. I ran from the Nazis. This
was true with Strauss, too. Do you know Mr. Dooley, a comic strip figure in the early
twentieth century who used to go around saying, Politics aint beanbag?
Both Strauss and Sklar understood this because it turned out to have mattered what
political theorists and moral philosophers and everybody else had been saying in Germany
throughout the 19th century. The two of them were debating whether the Enlightenment led
to disaster. Strauss was saying it had and Sklar was replying, No, no. Enlightenment
is probably the thing thats going to save us. Well, right! Yeah, thats a
real question! Im ready for that one.
All this is a very elaborate way of simply saying that from the beginning something was
lodged in my head about the kind of moral and intellectual seriousness that characterized
the good life. At that time, I didnt have the idea that Judaism was an alternative
version of what I had seen. That I didnt know.
SC: Im curious about Judith Sklar and Strauss. Youve presented this wonderful
narrative in which people arrive at various key moments to influence you, to remind you of
this Jewish standard. At the same time, youve spoken in passing about some very
negative childhood and family experiences with things Jewish. I was wondering whether you
feel your idea about your professional identitythe idea that If Im not
doing Jewish, I have to do this other thing with great moral seriousnessis
rooted in your family history, or whether you only came to this later?
SE: No, it was from the beginning. Like everybody, I had a complicated childhoodsome
people must grow up fairly simply but I've never met them. Its an interesting
question as to how a kind of moral seriousness, in the sense that this is what I had
to be, was given to me from the beginning. Its puzzling to me because my
father was a very quiet guy, although he was much more formidable than I had any clue
about. He was born in Russia, but he came here when he was a year old. My mother was born
in Omaha, Nebraska. Believe it or not, her father and his two brothers went to homestead
in Nebraska, which is a whole other story. She was a highly intelligent and very
frustrated woman, a victim of having been born at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Neither of them ever explicitly indicated anything beyond simply the expectation that I
would be a good boy and do well in schoolthe usual stuffwhich of course I
dutifully did. At least, I did well in school; Im not entirely sure I was quite a
good boy, but you cant have everything. But they conveyed something else to me, I
now see. They were people who took their own obligations enormously seriously. My father
had a very large family and so did my mother, and there was incredible attentiveness to
fulfilling obligations because that was what you were supposed to do, period. Any sort of
shoddy behavior would have been unthinkable.
So I think what did come acrossand Im sure this came from Judaism in my
mothers casewas the sense that someone was supposed to do something good in
the world, period. I didnt find anybody in undergraduate school who shared that
sense. I loathed graduate school, which I started in 1961. But my salvation really was
James Q. Wilson, who did share it. I mean it was just dumb luck, and maybe also, since he
was obviously not Jewish, it must have been that I was highly tuned to anybody who would
talk political science and moral philosophy in the same sentence, who would take both
things very seriously as a form of normative inquiry.
When I went to Smith after graduate school in 1966, it was like the narrative you
describedsomeone walking in from the wings at a key moment. There was a man named
Leo Weinstein, who was, in fact, one of Strauss students. Again I was tuned to the
right melody because I went right to Weinstein. I think I literally saidwhich is
embarrassingI really want to learn, will you help teach me? I told him I
was interested in classical political thought. I have to say that none of the people
Ive turned to ever laughed at me, because it would have been real easy.
When I got to Maryland, I guess I decided I was just going to have to do it myself. I was
going to have to set up organizations and vehicles for finding people to talk to me. It
was no longer a question of finding someone to teach me because I had already concluded I
would have to teach myself, but of finding colleaguesCpeople who were engaged in this kind
of common enterprise.
SC: Were you involved in any activism during the 60s?
SE: No. Im very uneasy with enthusiasm.
SC: You mean youre not a joiner.
SE: Im really not. Im very gregarious and I like talking, but theres
something about group effort that doesnt do much for me. Im getting better at
it; it requires a kind of careful attentiveness I had to learn to cultivate. You have to
believe that most people have something really useful to say if you just listen.
SC: But there must have been, to go back to your earlier experiences, something directly
related to the Jewish that impressed you early on for you to set up this
contrast between those people over there who are doing this Jewish thing which
Im not doing, which means that I must be . . . .
SE: . . . over here. I guess Id put the question like this: What was it about my
experience with Judaism that made me hold onto it long enough not to kill it? Kill
it, meaning to pack it up. Im not sure I have any idea what the answer to that
question is.
SC: The experiences that you describe are negative; Ive heard you mention, for
example, prayers without meaning. So what did make you want to hold on to
Judaism?
SE: I am someone who was brought up in a Jewish household in which Judaism was taken very
seriously. My father was an Orthodox Jew. Even though he stopped putting on tefillin,
Judaism was central. And yet I had, at some point, walked away completely. There was
something about the synagogue environment that made it like an invitation that in the end
never lived up to its promise. As a child I was always asking questions like, Why is
the sky blue, Daddy? That suggests the five-year-old or eight-year-old moral
philosopher was coming to synagogue or Hebrew school with this on his mind. But I
wasnt able to go from my questions to discussion or study or something. This
didnt leave me saying, Ill never touch this again. It just made me
very sad in a way I didnt actually know until much, much later.
For me, the great defining moment of my religious career, or non-career, came when I was
in graduate school. I decided that it was time to try again, that is, to start going to
synagogue or whatever. So on Yom Kippur I put on my suit and walked to the Hillel and the
door was locked. It turned out that Yom Kippur had been the day before. I took this as a
sign that my religious vocation was hard to discern and so that was it. I never, as it
were, went back. Of course, I cleverly increased the odds that I would never go back by
marrying a woman who is not only gentile, but someone who thinks Judaismor any
religionis nonsense. And we were clever enough not to have children and that sort of
finished it off entirely, no hope whatsoever. And yet I never dropped my sense of myself
as a Jew or my sense of the importance of Judaism, but I had no way of making sense of it.
It makes my heart ache. There is something missing, something profoundly important to me.
My wife really understands that this is somehow terribly important to me and she probably
puts it in the same category as my being an academic: Difficult to understand, but I
love him so what can I do? It is entirely possible that, had I married a Jewish
woman who had any real interest in Judaism, I might have gotten started earlier, but
frankly I probably would have ended up in the usual synagogue in the usual bored way with
the usual children and that would have killed it. That really would have done the trick.
Maybe Judaism is a live option now because Im so ignorant. If I knew any more it
might be too late.
After the closed door at Hillel, I never went back because it wasnt a real live
alternative, it didnt exist for me. After I came to Maryland, I was trying to decide
what the hell I was going to do with my intellectual lifesince I wasnt going
to do survey research and other thingsand I went back to reading. I dont even
know if I wrote anything for five years; I certainly didnt do much. A lot of what I
read was Leo Strauss, as it turned out. I wasnt quite sure even after that what was
going to happen, but I did know that either I was going to do a kind of morally serious
political science or I was going to quit. I was just lucky because I found a way to do it,
one that suited me anyway.
SC: What did you actually start doing at that point? What was the next project?
SE: It turned out to be a book called City and Regime in the American Republic. Which is a
book about, not surprisingly, cities, understood in the way Toqueville and John Stuart
Mill understood them, in which local governments are schools of citizenship. I
had been teaching urban politics, and as with the survey research, I was thinking to
myself, There must be something here that makes sense. I decided that city
politics isnt just about problems of distribution and powerthis is what
studies of urban politics always focused onbut about how people are formed into
certain kinds of citizens. That is, institutions arent just relationships of
authority; they are forms of relation among citizens, and between citizens and leaders.
Institutions define the terms on which people have access to one another. They help form
peoples characters. Character for what? How do you judge that? In order to talk
about that, I had to find a normative way to talk about American politics without cutting
loose from our empirical understanding of it. City and Regime was the first attempt to do
that. A relatively successful attempt since it kept me in clothes for quite a while.
SC: The activist part of your work is something else Im curious about. When you
founded your first organization, the Conference Group on Political Economy, and then PEGS
in 1990, and your new center, the Democracy Collaborative last year, were you thinking
about the same questions?
SE: Yep. It was 1978 when I founded the Conference Group, and with that and the two later
efforts I was trying to find my way to a new form of political science, something which
was simultaneously highly theoretical and relentlessly practical. There are plenty of
historical examples of this: the Federalist papers are both and so is John Locke;
Aristotle is the other obvious example. But I thought it would be nice to discover whether
there was anybody else out there doing it. The particular idea that I turned to was
political economy, which historically had been the theory of practice of a certain kind of
regime, the science of legislation for a commercial society as practiced by Adam Smith. So
I just assembled tons of people who were, in one way or another, running around worrying
about this. What I offered them was a chance to do normatively oriented work that was also
empirical so that they didnt have to choose between positivist political science and
political philosophy of the traditional sort. I simply said, Look, theres
something else. Well call it political economy. I didnt use these words
then, but I was looking for a theory of democratic practice.
I brought together a whole range of intellectual types who were interested in political
practice, not just political science, people for whom the question of practice was really
important but who were not themselves activists. I had always promised myself that the
project would include activists, but of course I wildly underestimated the amount of time
and effort that it was going to take to do even what I ended up doing. There were just
limits. Universities will only let you sit around not writing things for so long. So I
built PEGS as a way of continuing to do mostly academic work. But theres no doubt
now that even though the activism part is hard to do, it is going to get done. Either that
or well just fail.
SC: Is this connected to the question of whether Judaism remains a live
option, or a live alternative, for you? What does being a live
option mean exactly?
SE: Thats another one of those doozeys. It means having a choice between two things
without knowing what Im going to do about either of them. It certainly means study,
careful study. Im just constituted that way. It also means practice. At the Jewish
Public Forum seminar in June 1999, I learned to take seriously the claim that practice is
probably more important than thinking. You do, first, and then comes the thinking.
Thats crazy. No academic worth five cents thinks that. Its just for ordinary
people. We just think about things; then afterwards, of course, we dont do anything
at all.
At the same time, I have all of the deficiencies of an intellectual snob. Its a
terrible burden. Every year for about three years now, Ive been saying that I really
ought to join a synagogue. I havent worked out whether what I am really interested
in is the synagogue as a place to pray or whether Im interested in being with Jews
talking about Jewish things. Im sure the latter is better than the former. Its
ridiculous, this kind of intellectual snobbery. It gets in the way a lot. So Im
waiting for another sign, another person to walk in offstage. A burning bush?
SC: A burning bush sounds good. Have your encounters with CLAL in some way addressed your
need for thought and practicefor being with Jews talking about Jewish
things?
SE: Oh, absolutely. I stuck with it at first because it was Jews. Its interesting:
most of the people Im close to in Washington, as opposed to my family, are gentile,
which is really odd for a Jew with my general background and age. About two years ago, I
went to see an old college friend. We both grew up in the Bronx and I realized that that
part of my life had just simply disappeared. When I went out to see him, it was back to
that world. I reverted, as it were, to some kind of childhood Bronx self. We had a whale
of a time. My wifean English woman from a very different culture who is also a
gentilethought we were nuts. Theres a little bit of that feeling of
familiarity here at CLAL.
When I finally worked out that you might know what you were doing I thought, Oh
well, so thats what theyre trying to look at. Alright. Good. That I
understand. Youre up to something that I know is serious and I might or might
not be of use.
SC: What was your response when David Elcott (who at the time was Academic Vice President
of CLAL) invited you in 1997 to participate in a focus group that would eventually lead to
the founding of the Jewish Public Forum? Did it seem odd to you to be invited to a Jewish
organization?
SE: Sure. But it only became clear to me later how odd it was. Some guy was willing to pay
my train fare and Gar Alperovitz, my longtime colleague, was going anyway, so how
dangerous could it be?
SC: He didnt come to you because you guys were Jews, he came to you because he was
researching think tank models.
SE: Right. Still, I didnt figure out why he invited me, even though the source of it
was in the conversation I had with him when I told him about this business of growing up
in this ridiculous Jewish/non-Jewish way and just being furious about it. I think
thats why he invited me. But I didnt know that until I got here.
I sat through the entire morning wondering what I was doing here and not understanding
half of what was being said. Then, about 4:00 pm, David said, Well, Steve, why
dont you tell us what you told me. That was the first time I really told
anyone how sad I was, and how angry. And then some really smart person asked me what had
provided me with the clue that there was a Judaism worth having. I said, Leo
Strauss. So then I thought, Well, David has me here as a specimen of what can
go wrong, of failure. That is, of the way in which Judaism, as it has been, has just
failed some of its perhaps most thoughtful possible adherents.
Now that Ive thought some more about what you all are doing, I realize Im here
because Im someone who still thinks of himself as a Jew and who is struggling to
connect that feeling to the world in which I am now operating, this public/semi-public
world. And what you want is some guys like me, for whom thinking about the changes in the
society and what those changes will mean for communities is connected up in a very
inchoate way to Jewishness; its the connection between the two which is the actual
subject. So if you get those guys in the room, plus lots of other guys, you might actually
have a conversation.
I thought I was doomed to wander aimlessly through the religious night, garments rent,
hair tousled, to fall into my grave and then there would be a little whisper: Stupid
son of a bitch, he didnt pay attention. Not a happy prospect, I admit. But I
see CLAL as a place where someone who is fumbling around like I am is extremely useful. In
fact, it gives me a lot of hope, to tell you the truth. I may not be able to get to
synagogue but I can get on the train and come up here. I have to say, all silliness aside,
part of what has kept me coming is that the CLAL staff strikes me as just intelligent,
thoughtful people. The feeling is not, as you know, we know, we teach (it
wouldnt help with me, since I dont listen), but more were sort of
fellow searchers even though we know a lot of things you dont know about things you
do want to know. Its very open and inviting, which makes a difference because
Im not easy to invite. But the people around here are all just very good at it. If
youd been different Jews, who knows?
What I think I see is that its possible to think about Judaism in a way that makes
it okay for me notat the moment in any eventto worry about the synagogue and
to worry about rules of kashrut and so forth. It was a genuine question: How should
Judaism be understood? The level of my ignorance was so profound that it had never
occurred to me that the rabbinical Judaism that I was taught was in fact just
one version of Judaism. It might be the normative version of the world I inhabited, but it
certainly wasnt the only possible one. And there have been all kinds of people who
have tried to rethink all this.
So what I like about CLAL is that it is an effort to keep those doors open and also to
make some possible connections between the lives that people actually lead in this world
and Judaism itself, between, on the one hand, Judaism as a certain kind of religion and,
on the other, Judaism as a set of practices in the world. And I like the idea that out of
that kind of back and forth conversation something will emerge. The third covenant? I
dont know.
But the point is that its now timeits been time for a long timeto get a
lot of Jews together who are pretty sure about two things. The way in which the Jewish
community is organized and what actually happens in synagogues are not doing the trick. No
one quite knows what might do the trick, but well never find out unless we talk
about it. Not only do we have to talk about it -- we have to talk about it a lot over time
consistently, persistently.
Amazingly enough, both CLAL and PEGS are actually taking off from the same point of
departure, which is that theres something happening out there, guys, and
its making a big difference. My version of it is that two things are going on.
Theres an increase in both the desire and the respect for democratic political
practice and at the same time theres a deterioration of it.
SC: That makes me think again about the importance Leo Strauss had for you. Could you say
a few more words about the role his ideas played in your making these conceptual links?
SE: Its captured by his phrase that the real alternatives are Athens and Jerusalem.
As soon as I read that I said, You know, Leo, youre probably right. I
mean it had never occurred to me to think of it that way. To think that in order to
understand the pole of religious belief you needed to understand the way in which
classical thought was the sort of progenitor of much of secular and liberal civilization.
And that these really were alternatives. He taught that you might not be able to settle
which one is better because they are the permanent alternatives and thats it. As he
says, and who knows whether he meant it because he spent a lot of time not saying what he
meant, Spinoza demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that you cant finish the
argument from Revelation. You can try, but you just cant do it. That made Judaism a
real live possibility.
Then theres the larger question of why Judaism as opposed to anything else. My
solution to that is just straightforward. You have to start where you are. Look, in the
end it probably doesnt matter one way or the other. If there is some sort of
transcendent whatever, hes surely not going to be only interested in Jews.
Theres no reason to start one place rather than the other except for one being the
place where you are, the place from which you know how to talk. I didnt know until
relatively late that Strauss was a real Jewish thinker and not just a teacher of political
theory. In the beginningthough I got the Athens and Jerusalem ideaI
didnt realize how much work he had done on explicitly Jewish subjects, and I
didnt know at all that thats where his work had started, biographically
speaking. He wrote on Maimonides and Spinoza very early on. He got to the United States
because he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that got him out of Germany and he
never went back, but all of his work when he was in Germany was on Jewish subjects in a
Jewish institute.
The idea that one would really want to read Maimonides -- that I would ever think that
reading Maimonides was likely to be decisive for anything important in my life -- seemed
an utterly ridiculous thing before I read Strauss. It may be ridiculous now, too, who
knows? I genuinely think, though, that if I could ever spend the time and have the
ability, that this would be one of the most important things I could do. Well see.
That was all Strauss, it was as simple as that. Theres a guy of vast learning and
penetration of mind whos telling you, This is it. You can pay attention or
not. Its up to you. Considering I dont have children, and that I have
lots of money in the bank, that I still have my health, that I love my wife,
whateverwhy not? I mean what else am I going to do? Or alternatively, I think about
it like, Schmuck, is there really anything more important than this? So
thats where Strauss got me. Well see.
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