In his Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green newly configures the approach taken to the age-old problem of reason and revelation by the towering 12th-century philosopher Moses Maimonides and by his 20th-century interpreter Leo Strauss. Daniel Rynhold writes in his review:

Modern thought, Green argues, has approached religion by either refuting it or “claiming to contain it in versions of rational moralism,” which amounts “merely to [putting] it to sleep by attempting to . . . repress or deny the deeper conflict in the soul of each human being.” . . . As [Friedrich] Nietzsche had before him, Strauss recognized “the frailty of reason as a substitute for religion in political life, never mind what its absence from morality and psychology yields as an access to the human soul.” But while Nietzsche’s response to the threat of nihilism called on man to fill the vacuum himself, . . . Strauss came to understand through his study of Maimonides that Nietzsche’s post-religious nihilism could only be avoided through a return to revelation. . . .

For Green’s Strauss, the key to Maimonidean wisdom is the view that the dialectic between Jerusalem and Athens defines Western civilization; the modernist attempt to dissolve that tension ignores the centrality and power of the religious impulse for human endeavor. . . . Thus . . . Strauss echoes a number of modern Jewish philosophers . . . in thinking that “a balance of forces and a dynamic tension is healthier in the mind than a single dominant view or form of thought in complete control,” and it is in his unearthing of the hidden Maimonides that Strauss discovers the way to navigate this necessary tension. Green’s Strauss is not, therefore, a cynical atheist—and neither is his Maimonides.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.