TV Note: Saul Bellow: The Tikvah Fund Before The Tikvah Fund!

[David Shasha]

Saul Bellow: The Tikvah Fund Before The Tikvah Fund!

 

When I was a student at the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, I was completely lacking in any sense that there was such a thing as Sephardic culture, and the model of a Jewish writer I was provided by my English teachers was the vile Saul Bellow.

 

I have written about my YOFHS experience more generally in my very angry article on the late Rabbi David Eliach, with his fierce contempt for Sephardim and for the Sephardic heritage:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fvgd94a2OB84vBnKwa8M8ams-vhm1x2vaXoMl8f3jA0/edit

 

I have a faint memory of being praised for a poem I wrote back then, which I called “Based on Humboldt’s Gift and 1984.”

 

I hope that no copy of the poem exists today!

 

Humboldt’s Gift was the name of the then-current Bellow novel, which I do not think I ever finished, and I am sure at this late date that my pretenses – a very YOFHS thing to have! – got the best of me, and I really had no idea what I was thinking or writing.

 

Just trying to fit into a place that never wanted me to begin with.

 

These days I have a much better understanding of that experience and how it warped me – until I was able to see beyond the White Jewish Supremacy and look at where I came from and how the Sephardic heritage acted much like “The Wizard of Oz” – There’s no place like home!

 

Watching the PBS American Masters “The Adventures of Saul Bellow,” made by the very Israeli Asaf Galay – who I assume is a White Jewish Supremacist – all the bad memories came back to me:

 

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/adventures-of-saul-bellow-documentary/23790/

 

Rather than doing any real detailed analysis of Bellow here, I am including two Forward articles on the documentary, and a piece on Bellow from JTA which looks back on his very checkered career.

 

What I would say with assurance is that Bellow was a prime mover of University of Chicago Straussian Neo-Conservatism, which was made clear in his overly enthusiastic introduction to his friend Allan Bloom’s notorious Neo-Con tract The Closing of the American Mind, a book that is certainly a reification of White Christian European Supremacy, as the Neo-Con Jews found their true voice in the Reagan era. 

 

It was the high-water mark moment for the Norman Podhoretzes and Irving Kristols; the true progenitors of The Tikvah Fund:

 

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/athens-the-midway-defending-leo-strauss-11859?nopaging=1

 

The complete article, which links Bellow and Strauss, follows this note.

 

What I would say about the American Masters documentary is that it does an excellent job presenting what a degenerate Bellow was; married five times, he attacked all his wives under the cover of his fiction in the most disgusting way.  Many of his children are interviewed in the documentary, and it makes for some very uncomfortable and harrowing admissions, which provide an accurate portrait of Ashkenazi hubris in the context of Bellow’s obliviousness, which can truly be seen in the baffling final marriage to a student of his, Janis Freedman, who was 43 years younger than her new husband:

 

https://thecjn.ca/arts/books-and-authors/bellows-son-reveals-fathers-less-public-persona/

 

It is a sordid tale, worthy of Bellow’s novels:

 

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-06-19-9406190395-story.html

 

It is truly fascinating to see the final Mrs. Bellow squirm as she tries to talk about her own pathetic portrayal in Bellow last novel Ravelstein, a book which outed the great Neo-Con Reaganite Allan Bloom as a homosexual. 

 

As I was watching her squirm so uncomfortably, like the rest of the very sad Bellow extended MISHPOCHEH, I asked myself: “What did she think he would write about her, given his previous track record?”

 

The documentary presents a very disagreeable, crotchety, arrogant man whose books were filled with racism, misogyny, and the kind of arrogance that can only come from a White Jewish Supremacist.

 

It is thus no surprise that one of the primary talking heads featured in the documentary is our dear Tikvah friend Ruth Wisse, a staunch Bellow Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacist ally:

 

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/a4xsIrYw3Hc/m/sS573TgYAgAJ

 

To his credit, Galay also features African-American novelist Charles Johnson and feminist writer Vivian Gornick to call out Bellow’s racism and misogyny:

 

https://povmagazine.com/the-adventures-of-saul-bellow-review-top-of-the-shelf/

 

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/02/vivian-gornick-takes-on-novelists-bellow-roth/

 

And in that context, the documentary presents what was the final on-screen interview by the great Philip Roth – who also had a shaky record with women, though nowhere near as horrible as his hero Bellow – who presents a form of Ashkenazi literary idol-worship, which is true as far as how Bellow initiated a different way for American Jews to write, but which Roth ultimately threw in the garbage, as his later novels – once he created the Zuckerman character – show a very wise advance on Bellow’s narrow-mindedness and Neo-Con racist paranoia.

 

It is worthwhile to read the best of Roth’s later work as an antidote to Bellow:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KtEjPfnAF8Gn9N60-cOHo1g1pKVE1cKoa-OJ_OL8fKc/edit

 

His Plot Against America has been an invaluable resource for the Trump era:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17QqdpyAW55FDY_4MBpjVpGkhROusHIpLQi41Ubpo2vE/edit

 

Beyond Bellow’s excellent first novel, The Adventures of Augie March, which is indeed an important landmark in American literature and Ashkenazi Jewish identity, it is all very dark, narcissistic, and depressing.

 

And I would like here to take a swipe at Salman Rushdie, who is presented as a major Bellow acolyte in the documentary, and whose views are very Bari Weiss Rufo Institute.

 

I prefer to remember the Rushdie I once knew:

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dxkUy18X591NhYTzqS1umlLTXR6Tzl_35sO7tTA7htA/edit

    

In the end, I highly recommend watching “The Adventures of Saul Bellow” as an excellent example of all that is wrong with Ashkenazi Jews, and how their hubris has worked to undermine traditional Jewish values. 

 

Bellow did indeed pave the way for The Tikvah Fund, and to see his decrepit life and self-obsessed hateful novels presented in such a transparent manner is an important validation of the many horrible things I have said about Tikvah and the damage it continues to do to American society.

 

Saul Bellow was there first!

 

 

David Shasha

 

As landmark Saul Bellow documentary premieres, a look back at his life through the JTA archive

By: Gabe Friedman

Given his place in the international literary canon, it’s hard to believe that there has never been a widely-released documentary made about the Jewish Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.

That’s about to change, as PBS debuts “American Masters: The Adventures of Saul Bellow” on Monday night.

The documentary, which was filmed by Israeli director Asaf Galay between 2016 and 2019 and features what is being touted as the last interview Philip Roth gave before his death in 2018, digs deep into Bellow’s personal life and inspirations. Many know about his successful novels and memorable (usually Jewish) characters, but as the film shows, Bellow had a turbulent personal life that involved five marriages. Several of his closest friends and family members felt betrayed or offended by how Bellow wrote unflattering characters closely based on them. His moderate conservative political leanings put him at odds with the ethos of the 1960s, and some saw his framing of occasional Black characters as racist.

But the film also devotes time to explaining — through interviews with scholars, other novelists and members of the Bellow clan — how Bellow’s deep-rooted sense of “otherness” as the son of Jewish immigrants influenced his work, and how he, in turn, influenced many Jewish American writers who followed him. Roth, for instance, says on camera that Bellow inspired him to create fuller Jewish characters in his own work.

To mark the milestone film, we looked back through all of the Saul Bellow content in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s archive. What emerged was a portrait of a leading Jewish intellectual of his time who was deeply invested in the Soviet Jewry movement and Israel, and who was beloved by the American Jewish community — despite his complicated relationship to his Jewishness and his bristling at being called a “Jewish writer.”

The Soviet Jewry movement

Bellow was born in 1915 in Canada to parents with Lithuanian ancestry who first immigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. In the 1920s, when Bellow was 9, the family moved to Chicago. By the 1950s, the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union — who were forbidden from openly practicing their religion and from emigrating — had become a rallying cry for American Jews. As a 1958 JTA report shows, Bellow was passionate about the issue; in January of that year, he signed a letter to The New York Times about “the purge of Yiddish writers, the refusal of the current Soviet regime to permit a renaissance of Jewish culture and the existence of a quota system on Jews in education, professional and civil service fields.” Other signatories included fellow Jewish writers Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling.

He signed another letter to the Times on the topic in 1965, and in 1969 he circulated an appeal for cultural freedom for Jews to the Soviet Writers Union, getting other prominent writers such as Noam Chomsky and Nat Hentoff to sign. By 1970, the issue had become widely publicized, and Bellow stayed involved, signing onto a petition with several other thought leaders that asked: “Has the government of the Soviet Union no concern for human rights or for the decent opinion of mankind?”

Israel

Like many American Jews, Bellow had complicated feelings on Israel. “If you want everyone to love you, don’t discuss Israeli politics,” he once wrote.

In the 1970s, JTA reports show that he followed Israeli diplomacy closely and was a strong supporter of the Jewish state in the face of international criticism. In 1974, at a PEN press conference, he called for a boycott of UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural heritage arm that has historically been very critical of Israeli policy.

In 1984, Bellow met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was in the United States on an official state visit.

But Bellow wasn’t a blanket supporter of Israel — in 1979, he signed a letter protesting West Bank settlement expansion that was read at a rally of 30,000 people in Tel Aviv. In 1987, while in Haifa for a conference on his work, Bellow criticized the Israeli government for the way it handled the Jonathan Pollard spy case, bringing up an issue that still reverberates in Israel-Diaspora conversation — and in U.S. politics.

“I think the American Jews are very sensitive to the question of dual allegiance, and it is probably wrong of Israel to press this question because it is one which is very often used by antisemites,” Bellow said.

Nobel Prize

After garnering multiple National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. JTA’s report on the award noted that Bellow’s most recent book at the time, published right around the time of the Nobel announcements, was a memoir about his 1975 stay in Jerusalem, titled “To Jerusalem and Back.” The report added: “Two of his books, ‘Herzog,’ published in 1964 and ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’ which won him the National Book Award in 1971, have been translated into Hebrew and were enthusiastically received by Israeli critics and public.”

(Bellow wasn’t the only Jew to win a Nobel that year: Milton Friedman won the economics prize, Baruch Blumberg shared the medicine prize and Burton Richter shared the physics prize.)

A “Jewish writer”?

The Anti-Defamation League also gave Bellow an award in 1976. According to a JTA report, Seymour Graubard, honorary national chairman of the ADL at the time, said that Bellow “has correctly rejected all efforts to pigeonhole him as a ‘Jewish writer.’ Rather, he has simply found in the Jewish experience those common strains of humanity that are part of all of us — and therein lies his greatness as an American writer.”

Debate over whether or not Bellow should be labeled a “Jewish writer,” and what that meant, dogged him for much of his career. After his death in 2005, at 89, a New York Jewish Week obituary focused on Bellow as “a literary giant who did not want to be bound by the tag of Jewish writer.”

“Mr. Bellow bridled at being considered a Jewish writer, though his early novels, most notably 1944’s ‘The Victim,’ dealt with anti-Semitism and featured characters who spoke Yiddish and Russian,” Steve Lipman wrote. 

Bellow’s biographer James Atlas added in the obituary: “He always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third. But all three were elements of his genius. His greatest contribution was that he was able to write fiction that had tremendous philosophical depth.”

In a JTA essay at the time of Bellow’s death, academic and fiction writer John J. Clayton argued: “No good writer wants to be pigeonholed or limited in scope. But he is deeply a Jewish writer — not just a Jew by birth.

“Jewish culture, Jewish sensibility, a Jewish sense of holiness in the everyday, permeate his work.”

From JTA, December 12, 2022

 

To know what Saul Bellow thinks of cancel culture, read his work (or watch this film)

By: PJGrisar

On his deathbed, Saul Bellow asked a question his admirers and detractors have long been agonizing over: “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”

Of course this is a false binary. But when Bellow said “man,” his biographer Zachary Leader ventures in The Adventures of Saul Bellow, the new American Masters documentary on PBS, what he really meant was “mensch.”

Bellow was speaking about “a human being showing the best of human qualities,” Leader says in the film. “Jerk,” he offers by way of comparison, may be self-explanatory, but also “a Bellow word” that pops up in his fiction.

Which was he? The documentary is agnostic, speaking to authors, critics, friends, family and surviving ex-wives who alternate between praise of his humanistic prose, and indictments of his prolific betrayals via novel of many in his life.

Israeli director Asaf Galay, who previously made The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer, about the Nobel winner’s women translators, was excited by Bellow’s complexity.

“It makes a better story,” Galay said. “This is his literature.”

Weaving together Bellow’s TV interviews and literary analysis and insights from Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth and Vivian Gornick, Galay’s film unpacks the uniquely American-Jewish cadence of Bellow’s writing, while never forgetting the damage he could do with a dazzling sentence. In 2022, the film is strikingly relevant to today’s discourse on “cancel culture” and divorcing art from the artist.

I spoke with Galay and executive producer Michael Kantor about Bellow’s genius, his foibles and filming Philip Roth’s last interview. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

PJ Grisar: What was your first introduction to Bellow?

Asaf Galay: I saw one of his books in my grandfather’s library. It was Mr. Sammler’s Planet. I was, I think, 18 and I didn’t like it so much. I didn’t understand. Later on, when I’m 27, I read Henderson the Rain King. It was really appealing to a 27-year-old and then later, around 35, I started to dig into his literature and it became a spiritual passage to me. I think that this is maybe the problem with Bellow. He is not that accessible at each age. It’s not like Hemingway. You need to have some life experience to really enjoy it.

Were you reading it in Hebrew originally?

Galay: First I started in Hebrew, but then later to enjoy it I had to learn better and to improve my English.

Michael Kantor: I’m curious, did Bellow write anything in Hebrew?

Galay: No. It’s a really good translation to Hebrew, but of course every translation is a big traitor. It’s losing so much of the beautiful English.

Kantor: I learned from the film that Bellow started reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, at the age of 4 or 5 or something and that became part of his sort of storytelling universe. 

I didn’t read Bellow in college, but when I met my wife, her mother had a book on her bookshelf, Herzog, and it turns out this is the most important book on her whole bookshelf. Why? Because it was actually a book filled with pages, but in the old style, it was hollowed out and it’s where she hid her money and her jewelry. So in our family to this day, we have the same kind of hiding place, which we call Herzog, even though it doesn’t say “Herzog” on it.

American Masters is the name of the series but in some ways, it’s like a prompt or a question in terms of Bellow’s Americanness and how he claimed it. Obviously, there’s that first line of Augie March: “I am an American, Chicago born.” But he was born in Canada. One of the scholars says he’s really saying he was born as a writer in America. Was that question on your mind approaching him as  this American creation of himself?

Galay: So I am an Israeli born in Chicago. My father was studying at the University of Chicago, I was born in ‘78 and Bellow was the big name in those years in the University of Chicago. When I came back to the States 10 years ago, I started to read Bellow again. Bellow is a great guide to the American spirit, to the American culture. He’s an outsider that looks into the inside of the culture, to the society. It’s amazing.

You conducted the last interview Philip Roth ever gave. What was that like? Did he hesitate at all?

Galay: So first, when I approached him, he said, “No, I’m out of this business.”

He’d retired from writing novels at that point.

Galay: He was retiring from writing because of back problems, so he didn’t  need to do PR. So first he said no, and then I wrote him another letter because I’m noodging. I told him “But what will happen when you will meet Bellow again. You will not tell him that you refused.” “OK, OK. Come over. We’ll give you 20 minutes.” And then we came to his house in Connecticut, and it became like one hour and 30 minutes that he talked really about new issues. It was amazing. In most interviews, he’s like a politician. He’s always telling the same jokes. And I think when he talked about Bellow, he really talked about himself a lot.

Was there anybody who would not talk to you?

Galay: The family was very cooperative. They gave me complete access to everything, very supportive of the project. Five people wrote biographies; he always told them “everything is accessible. It’s your story. Just tell it.”

I guess he’d be something of a hypocrite if he didn’t. He mined so much from his life. I’m wondering how you felt going into the more knotty or troubling parts of the legacy and reading through those texts?

Galay: This is very important as a filmmaker to deal with all the issues, to bring in many ideas, many critics, I don’t do hagiographic films. You need to tell everything to try to to understand better and in the end to let the viewer judge it. I don’t do verdicts, I’m not a judge.

Kantor:  I was worried before I saw how Asaf was dealing with the story that Bellow’s been canceled, written off as a misogynist for many people. And I think, again, back to that great Philip Roth interview, he said, “Augie March changed my sense of what a novel could do, of what a Jewish writer could do with his experience. Because up until then, there wasn’t any Jewish writer who’s comparable, who was not in the public relations business who was not busy honoring Jews, or praising Jews or defending Jews. He just presented Jews and that’s what was liberating.” So I think in that sense, you know, there are people who have nasty divorces and there are people who go through all the different truthful aspects of what Bellow is presenting. And he just does it in an elevated way that is remarkable and that bears our reading and rereading. Within today’s climate, I want to let the work stand for itself.

We see Bellow reacting to all these  things that feel ripped from the headlines now. His response to crime in Chicago, campus culture. We talk about cancel culture, which wasn’t a term then but one wonders what he would think about what’s going on now.

Galay: I think that already in his own life, since the ‘80s, with political correctness, there was a lot of a clash between Bellow and his critics. It’s happened in his own life and you can see his response to it in his essays, in his writing, it’s nothing that you need to imagine. You just need to go and read Bellow.

From The Forward, December 12, 2022

 

Genius, jerk, misogynist, everyman — the many lives of Saul Bellow

By: Julia M. Klein

 

Asaf Galay’s documentary “The Adventures of Saul Bellow,” with its play on the title of Bellow’s breakthrough 1953 novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” adroitly signals its intentions: not just to thumbnail the writer’s picaresque life and literary career, but to seek out correspondences between the two.

With Bellow, who died at 89 in 2005, the temptation to read novels such as “Herzog,” and “Humboldt’s Gift” as autobiography has proven irresistible, for good reason. Bellow parlayed recognizable versions of his relatives, wives (there were five), lovers (too many to count), and friends (many of the great literary figures of his day) into characters – often to the dismay of those involved.

“There’s no way to defend yourself against a literary portrait,” says Daniel Bellow, the novelist’s son with his third wife, Susan Glassman, whose bitter legal battles with Bellow surface in “Humboldt’s Gift.”

Even Bellow’s widow, the reverential and devoted Janis Freedman-Bellow, admits to Galay that she disliked being the model for Rosamund in Bellow’s final novel, “Ravelstein,” whose title character was based on Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom.

In his recent definitive two-volume biography, Zachary Leader provided a nuanced account of Bellow’s borrowings. Leader is among the impressive array of literary scholars, novelists and intimates that Galay has enlisted to contextualize Bellow in this generally sympathetic and watchable documentary. Shown at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival in November, “The Adventures of Saul Bellow” is making the festival rounds and is scheduled to air on PBS’s “American Masters” this coming fall.

Galay begins with archival footage of Bellow’s Chicago, where the Canadian-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants was raised. “Bellow used the city as a character, almost,” the novelist Salmon Rushdie observes. Philip Roth, a close friend whose girlfriend Bellow once purloined, says that Bellow gave him “a sense of the capaciousness of fiction” – a feeling that “there were no rules.”

Freedman-Bellow’s loving memories of her late husband are the emotional heart of the film. Bellow’s onetime secretary and graduate student, more than 40 years his junior, she is the keeper of the shrine. She unveils Bellow’s library and her own faithful notes on 13 years of Bellow seminars. And she ushers the Israeli filmmaker into Bellow’s office at their Vermont summer home, with their daughter, Naomi Rose (born in 2000), silently looking on. “He would make a whistling noise under his breath as he worked. And he would labor over the sentences, his head turned slightly to the side,” Freedman-Bellow says. “It was magic to see.”

Galay also interviews Bellow’s fourth wife, the Romanian American mathematician Alexandra Ionesco Tulcea; his longtime girlfriend Margaret Staats Simmons, who still has the engagement ring he gave her, with its unlucky 13 diamonds; all three of his sons; and a variety of other critics and admirers.

One of the film’s organizing devices is having interviewees read aloud salient passages of Bellow’s prose, often fictional representations of themselves or those close to them. (Galay must be a persuasive man.) Adam Bellow, for instance, reads about the treacherous Madeleine, in “Herzog,” a jab at his mother, Sasha, Bellow’s second wife, who left him for another man. Adam remembers his mother telling him that she fell in love with Bellow only after he read her “Augie March” in its entirety – a case of the novelist mining his art for his life.

deathbed utterance: “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” The answer, per both the biography and the documentary, seems to be that Bellow was (like many) a bit of both – capable of inspiring great love, while leaving considerable destruction in his wake.

His fourth wife, who was with him when he won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, seems to still be mourning the demise of their relationship. “The end of any marriage is a very sad affair,” she says, her lip trembling. “He needed to move on. That was my feeling.” Galay underlines the emotion with elegiac images and music.

When it comes to Bellow’s work, the filmmaker gives voice to critics, including the novelist Charles Johnson and the feminist essayist Vivian Gornick, who skewer Bellow’s racist and misogynistic tropes. (One famous and hard-to-defend take on women in “Herzog:” “They eat green salad and drink human blood.”)

Galay doesn’t contest that Bellow’s views drifted rightward in the 1960s and ’70s as American culture, particularly in the academy, drifted leftward. But he is at pains to complicate simplistic readings of the work. In archival clips, Bellow underlines the point that he was often satirical – not unabashedly admiring – of the white male protagonists who serve as his fictional stand-ins.

Those interviews offer fascinating glimpses of a man who managed for a time to bestride both popular and literary culture. But they also betray Bellow’s unresolved anger toward the women in his life. He tells Dick Cavett: “I’ve never turned over a fig leaf that didn’t have a price tag on the other side.” In another interview, questioned about his conflictual relationships with women, he says: “My wish always was to make them happier than I found them.” Then he adds: “Of course I’m not a social service agency.”

Bellow’s prickliness is evident even through the soft scrim of Galay’s admiration and nostalgia. Though he stops short of hagiography, the filmmaker doesn’t delve deeply into the writer’s many infidelities and his intermittent cruelty to both his wives and his sons. Nor does he mention his late-life dementia. Galay prefers to highlight Bellow’s energetic prose and powerful sway over multiple generations of Jewish American (and other) writers. “I’m stamped with his influence,” says Philip Roth, in the last interview he gave before his 2018 death.

From The Forward, January 3, 2022

 

Athens on the Midway: Defending Leo Strauss

By: Gary Rosen

 

Robert Howse, Leo Strauss: Man of Peace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 188 pp., $29.99.

IN RAVELSTEIN, his last novel, Saul Bellow paid tribute to his friend and longtime University of Chicago colleague Allan Bloom, the political theorist whose Closing of the American Mind remains one of the great polemical tracts of the Reagan-era culture wars. A roman à clef executed with Bellow’s usual delight in the gritty particulars of place and person, the novel traces the final days of Abe Ravelstein (the Bloom character) and describes his peculiar relationship with the intense, brilliant circle of his followers. Ravelstein, we are told,

knew the value of a set. He had a set of his own. Its members were students he had trained in political philosophy and longtime friends. Most of them were trained as Ravelstein himself had been trained, under Professor Davarr and used his esoteric vocabulary. Some of Ravelstein’s older pupils now held positions of importance on national newspapers. Quite a number served in the State Department. Some lectured in the War College or worked on the staff of the National Security Adviser.

The action of the novel, it should be noted, takes place around the time of the first Gulf War, in the years leading up to Bloom’s death in 1992. The mysterious “Professor Davarr” is, of course, a stand-in for Leo Strauss, the great German Jewish political theorist who was Bloom’s teacher at the University of Chicago and whose writings and influence even now generate angry critiques and impassioned defenses. (Davarr is a bit of wordplay—in Hebrew, it means word, speech or argument, like the Greek logos.)

For the Bloom character in Ravelstein, the teachings of the Great Books—Thucydides, Plato, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche—are inseparable from the drama of Great Politics, stretching from the Athens of Pericles to the Cold War and beyond, very much including the headline-grabbing events of his own time:

What [Ravelstein] loved was to have the men he had trained appointed to important positions; real life confirming his judgments. He’d go aside with his portable phone and then he’d return to tell us, “Colin Powell and Baker have advised the President not to send the troops all the way to Baghdad. Bush will announce it tomorrow.”

In Bellow’s telling, the source of this “inside dope” about the Gulf War is a highly placed Pentagon official whose biographical details make clear that he is modeled on Paul Wolfowitz. “It’s only a matter of time before [the Wolfowitz character] has cabinet rank,” Ravelstein/Bloom declares, “and a damn good thing for the country.”

Bellow’s Ravelstein is a useful prologue for approaching Robert Howse’s worthy but painfully academic Leo Strauss: Man of Peace. Howse’s volume is the most recent addition to a growing bibliography devoted to assessing Strauss’s difficult ideas, not only in relation to the defining ideological controversies of the past century but also as they have (or have not) affected the foreign policy of the United States.

The debate over Strauss has acquired special intensity in the years since the attacks of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as the passages from Ravelstein make clear, interest in the public influence of Straussian ideas predates our own preoccupation with Islamic extremism and turmoil in the Middle East. Bloom—at once charming and mordant, ribald and haughty—was best known for his broadsides against the moral and intellectual disarray of elite higher education, but some measure of the ferocious response to his ideas also had to do with the prominence and influence of his disciples and those of other Straussians, especially in the ranks of Republican staffers in Washington.

What recent critics purport to show is that the most controversial foreign-policy ideas promoted by the American Right since 9/11—preemptive war, the aggressive promotion of democracy, an American imperium—can be traced to the baneful, authoritarian influence of Strauss and the Straussians. The tenor of their criticisms is evident in the titles of their books: Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, by Anne Norton; The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, by Shadia Drury; Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy, by Nicholas Xenos; and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism, by William H. F. Altman.

The title of Howse’s book also neatly communicates its intention. By calling Leo Strauss a “man of peace,” Howse announces that he is spoiling for a smackdown in the faculty lounge. The U.S. Supreme Court would call these “fighting words.” Among those who have bothered to flap their way into the more abstract reaches of the American foreign-policy debate in recent years, no term is more certain than “Straussian” to evoke a contemptuous snarl. The only rival for this distinction might be the term “neocon,” and the two are often conjoined, with the implication that the workaday scheming of the neocons is just the outward expression of the more esoteric truths of their late, lamented Dark Lord.

The caricature of Strauss as neocon impresario has even achieved a certain resonance in the wider culture. In Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed novel Freedom, written in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, an impressionable college student finds himself at a Thanksgiving table with “the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer.” The creepy blowhard tells the young man that “we have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts. Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

The first thing to say about such fantasies is prophylactic: don’t believe a word of them. Not because there aren’t Straussian neocons (Wolfowitz and William Kristol are the most prominent) or because there isn’t some degree of overlap in the characteristic obsessions of the two groups (the sixties weren’t as groovy as everyone thinks, moral relativism is both dangerous and incoherent, the West has grown complacent, military virtue is neither a joke nor a scandal, and so on).

The real problem is that Straussianism and neoconservatism are distinct frames of mind, with idiosyncratic histories of their own. The Venn diagram of their relationship is interesting less for the area of intersection than for the obvious examples of non-Straussian neocons (Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, David Frum, Max Boot) and the considerable group of thinkers whose ideas have been shaped by Strauss but who reject the neoconservative credo (Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, William Galston, Steven Smith, Nathan Tarcov) or seem largely indifferent to it (the vast majority of Straussian academics, busy going about their scholarly work).

For those intent on influence tracing, there is, too, the obvious problem of establishing some connection between Straussian thought and the actual development of major policies. In Howse’s book, whose focus is setting the record straight about Strauss himself rather than showing the real-world impact of his ideas, we find this typical summary of the indictment with respect to the George W. Bush administration’s “Iraq adventure”:

It got going with a New Yorker piece by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed that Strauss had taught the art of tyrannical rule, deception in politics, and the merits of a bellicose foreign policy to Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense and a leading advocate and planner of the Iraq intervention. James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, asserted that Strauss endorsed “the natural right of the stronger.” In a book published by Yale University Press . . . Anne Norton wrote that Strauss and his disciples were “proponents of war without limits.”

Here, at last, the fervent wish of Bellow’s Ravelstein has been realized! Wolfowitz has a cabinet post—or close enough. He has the ear of Donald Rumsfeld and the president and is thereby able to do . . . well, what exactly? Persuade them to invade Iraq in order to vindicate the demands of Straussian statecraft? Or consider the case of that other bête noire of the anti-Straussians, William Kristol, whose fervent advocacy of the Iraq War is well known. Did Kristol and the Weekly Standard—and thus the nefarious Strauss—lead us to endless war in the Middle East?

To ask such questions is to answer them. Whatever their influence (and whatever the influence of Strauss on them), Wolfowitz and Kristol were mid-level players in a debate that preoccupied most of the political and chattering class of the country for the better part of a year. Did they have an impact on the deliberations of the Bush administration? Did the president, vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state and national-security adviser pay attention to them? Maybe, some.

Did this supposed Straussian connection somehow determine the course of events, or even shape it in any discernible way? There is scant evidence for it. But that has not stood in the way of journalists and academics eager to discover sinister theoretical underpinnings for conservative policies they find objectionable. Such ideological hyperventilating may provide an emotional charge and bolster solidarity among the like-minded, but it does not go very far to explain how the abstractions of philosophers find their way into the practical decisions of policy makers.

In his own contribution to this discussion, Howse seeks to understand Strauss as Strauss understood himself (to borrow a venerable Straussian precept). He is thus preoccupied with Strauss’s writings, lectures and letters. Like previous authors plowing these fields, however, Howse is also interested to some extent in the phenomenon of the Strauss “cult”—that is, the fervent, often-cliquish group of Straussian teachers and students whose devotion to the Straussian “project” has now stretched over several generations.

About that peculiar, contradictory, edifying project, I can speak from personal experience, not from membership in the Ravelstein “set” so memorably evoked by Saul Bellow (I never knew Allan Bloom or attended the University of Chicago) but from the years in the early 1990s during which I got my PhD at Harvard studying with Harvey Mansfield, perhaps the best-known Straussian still active today (a teacher and scholar maligned by Howse as a “noisy right-wing public intellectual” for whom Strauss is “a kind of mascot or warhorse of conservative Kulturkampf”).

Howse is a professor of international law at New York University, and his chief concern is to describe Strauss’s views on three subjects related to his own field: the role of violence in statecraft and relations among states; the possibility and desirability of international governance or a world state; and the viability of international law, especially as a constraint on how and when states wage war. These may sound like narrow technical issues, but as Howse emphasizes, they require delving into Strauss’s relationship with the often-radical thinkers at the center of his thought—Thucydides, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, the existentialist and Nazi collaborator Martin Heidegger, and the Hegelian Marxist Alexandre Kojève.

Critics of Strauss find in his elusive, opaque writings about these figures a troubling readiness to provide, as Howse writes, “forceful articulations of extreme, antiliberal positions,” often accompanied by qualifications and critiques that seem muted or inadequate by comparison. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss showed that, as a historical practice and perhaps as an ongoing necessity, some philosophers have engaged at times in esoteric writing, concealing their true meanings amid reassuringly conventional “exoteric” views. For Strauss, the fate of Socrates was decisive in explaining the origins of esoteric writing: philosophy was potentially threatening to both the city and the philosopher himself; it had to be practiced with care. In reading Strauss, it is thus difficult to suppress the suspicion that his own deepest thoughts sometimes lurk beyond his stated views. Which are we to credit as more fundamental, Strauss’s avowal in an early letter that Nietzsche “so dominated and bewitched me between my 22nd and 30th year, that I literally believed everything I understood of him,” or his later insistence, consoling to liberal sensibilities, that “wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism”?

Howse tries to resolve such tensions by reminding us that Strauss was, in addition to everything else, a penetrating scholar of Jewish thought and a refugee from the world destroyed by the Nazi war against the Jews. As Howse sees it, the young Strauss shared to a degree the discontent with liberal principles among Weimar intellectuals on the right, many of whom belonged to what is known in Germany as the Konservative Revolution of the 1920s, a movement that prepared the way for a broader intellectual acceptance of Nazism. As Strauss wrote in an essay on the corrupting influence of Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger, part of their appeal to high-minded young Germans (himself presumably included) lay in their “sense of responsibility for endangered morality”—morality robbed of its heroism and nobility by petty calculation and self-interest.

For Howse, Strauss’s mature thought involves certain concessions to the allure of these thinkers—to his younger self, as it were—while at the same time presenting an alternative in the chastened, worldly wisdom of classical political thought, most of all in Plato and Thucydides. Howse calls this an instance of t’shuvah—that is, of return or repentance as understood in traditional Judaism. It involves, he writes,

a pulling back from the extreme through critique, often internal, of the extreme—a deeper, more radical level of philosophical reflection that . . . has the result of reestablishing the case for moral-political limits and for legality, hence moderation in Strauss’s sense. T’shuvah . . . is accomplished not through pious shame or remorse but through an even greater philosophical Redlichkeit [honesty, probity].

This is an appealing interpretation of Strauss, though Howse has no direct evidence for it and does little more than assert it. Strauss certainly never endorses it. But it does capture the tone of the material that Howse cites at great length to show that Strauss’s later views, on the questions of most concern to Howse, were far from radical. Strauss did fear the “Universal and Homogenous State” envisioned by Kojève—not because Strauss prized struggle and conflict, however, but because he worried about freedom of thought and preserving the full variety of human types. And there can be no doubt of Strauss’s impatience with grand schemes for perpetual peace—not because he despised peace but because he saw no foundation for such utopian hopes. As Howse summarizes this balanced view, Strauss affirmed “the rightfulness of international law as a constraint on brutality or gratuitous violence while questioning international law as a narrative of human progress or a guarantee of such progress.”

Much of Howse’s evidence on these issues derives from transcripts and recordings of Strauss’s lectures and seminars that have become available in recent years through the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago. That these materials exist in such abundance—Howse cites just a few of the many recorded courses, including seminars taught between 1958 and 1967 on Xenophon, Thucydides, Grotius, Kant, Hegel and Marx—is a testament to the spell cast by Strauss’s teaching. For me, having read Strauss’s books many years ago and written a doctoral thesis on Straussian themes, the recordings on the Strauss Center’s website are an astonishing find. There you hear the man himself, holding forth in surprisingly quick, lyrical, German-inflected English—and demanding attention. The master’s voice, indeed!

What, then, makes Strauss so compelling? What explains the allure of Straussian teachers and teaching? Many of the same things, I suspect, that have made Strauss and the Straussians so inviting a target for their critics inside and outside the academy. There is, among Straussians, the sense of initiation into an elite, an elect few whose distinction lies in seeing what others fail to see, in knowing truths that others lack the courage to confront. Among the graduate students in political theory in my own day, Straussian and non-Straussian alike, the imposing doorstop-size History of Political Philosophy that Strauss edited with Joseph Cropsey was popularly referred to by combining the color of its cover with the authority of its pretensions: it was, simply, the Purple Bible.

That all of this amounts to some flavor of cultural conservatism is obvious, but it is hard to detect in it a particular conservative politics. In my own experience of the “cult,” such as it is, dogmatism is considered gauche, intellectually and politically shallow. There are Straussians, but there is no telling, even at this late date, what Straussianism might be. The books of Strauss and of my own teacher, Harvey Mansfield, are tough going, so even from a straightforward careerist point of view, graduate students of a Straussian bent must struggle to figure out how to distill and reformulate the ideas of the teachers whom they wish to please and follow.

What was clear in my own training—and here the magnetic charm remains in all its force—was that the old books we read were not just of antiquarian or scholarly interest. They weren’t interchangeable “content” against which to test our “critical skills.” They were the great alternatives, the important human possibilities in all their variety. A student of Allan Bloom once insisted to me that a character in a Bellow novel was an American Alcibiades—an eye-opening thought, with more to come, I found, in the novelists whom Bloom loved and taught: Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy. It was all very heady and liberating; it felt universal, cosmopolitan.

But it was provincial too. Straussians are certainly excluded and disdained in much of the academy, but the sentiments are mutual. Dismissing colleagues or thinkers as benighted or politically correct becomes a ready excuse not to engage with them, inducing a certain lazy complacency in thought. And there is, finally, something jarring, especially in today’s academy, about the insistent, sometimes intentionally provocative delight that Straussians take in holding out the possibility that Plato or Machiavelli or Nietzsche might be not just interesting but, in some way, right—while at the same time hesitating to acknowledge what modernity has achieved by “lowering its sights” (another Straussian term of art) from the noble to the merely humane. This is not a program calculated to make nice with today’s fashionable advocates of “inclusiveness” (a notion that Strauss would have treated with contempt).

For me, at any rate, what continues to fascinate about the Straussian “cult” is the combination of such pretentious, high-minded universalism with an appreciation for the real work of political life, for the accommodation of interests and prejudices without losing sight of grander aims and possibilities. As Strauss wrote, in a much-repeated line, “Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.” Howse cites this Straussian motto in his own admirable effort to save Strauss from his more intemperate critics. But he might have been more generous in recognizing the same impulse in analyses of the interplay of philosophy and statecraft by followers of Strauss, like Harry Jaffa’s pioneering study of Abraham Lincoln and the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Harvey Mansfield’s profound book on Edmund Burke and the birth of modern partisanship.

Strauss himself traveled a considerable distance from his youthful infatuation with the most enticing and dangerously revolutionary streams of modern thought. A token of the hard-won insights of his “turning” can be found in the tribute that he paid to Winston Churchill, in front of his students, the day after the British statesman’s death in 1965:

The death of Churchill reminds us of the limitations of our craft, and therewith of our duty. We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.

Here is the Strauss whose work continues to attract those who see in politics an activity with its own dignity but also a horizon that points, potentially, beyond politics. Strauss bows at once to the needs of the many, in political life, and to the aspirations of the few, in the life of the mind—and he leaves himself and his would-be students in the middle of it all, trying to discriminate among necessarily shadowy, indistinct things in the confusion of our mortal cave.

Thanks to his detractors, Leo Strauss is far more famous now than he ever was during his lifetime, with discussion of his ideas and influence showing no sign of abating. “I used to run into Davarr on the street,” Bellow’s narrator observes in Ravelstein, “and it was hard to imagine that this slight person, triply abstracted, mild goggles covering his fiery judgments, was the demon heretic hated by academics everywhere in the U.S. and even abroad.” It remains hard to imagine today.

Gary Rosen is the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section and the former managing editor of Commentary. He is the author of American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding (University Press of Kansas, 1999).

From National Interest, December 16, 2014