just by googling and you will come up you'll come up with hundreds of references to the neocon leo strauss or the inspiration of the neocons or the intellectual inspiration for the iraq war. so why are all those people wrong to characterize strauss in that manner and how am i able to show that that's a misreading of him? i focus on several different features of my own intellectual journey to understanding leo strauss. one advantage that i had which is a very rare one in north america much more so in europe or israel is that i first encountered the law before i ever met a straussian or ever heard of straussianism. in high school i came across some of his writing on the medieval jewish philosophy and i was quite immediately gripped by a sense of tension come intellectual drama, the contest of reason and revelation. but in a sense i heard his voice unfiltered by the enemies of the straussianism and i think overall the subsequent years, something about that stuck with me even as i came to struggle with my experiences in studying with straussian and the kind of orthodox view of strauss and the

but as leo strauss famously argued there were two important pre- enlightenment, pre- liberal, premodern residues, one was classical republicanism and the other was religion. athens and jerusalem is and was also part of the. well, what about assimilation today? civic and cultural measures of assimilation are proceeding successfully. someone naturalized and became a citizen, okay. these are made in measures measures of civic assimilation but not measures a patriotic assimilation and tell us nothing about the deeper feelings. i can think of one political activist who would be successfully -- cynically assimilated. his name is gustavo tori. he is a citizen. he spent a good part of the cold war in nicaragua. an admirer of castro's communist regime. in 2,007 he spoke at a conference on revolution. casa was funded partly by the venezuelan government. i would suggest that he is not patriotically assimilated, but in a sense they are assimilated in today's multicultural framework. the did receive funds from the venezuelan government and more funds from the us government, the state of maryland the