I'll admit that I mainly got into Strauss because of BAP's mentioning of him. Now that BAP's old accounts are back up you can do searches to appreciate his particular perspective. At the risk of being presumptuous, I would say that BAP, like Lampert, is an exoteric Nietzschean who's appreciation of Nietzsche and of previous European philosophy perhaps owes a bit to Strauss. (Incidentally, I got Lampert's development wrong in my previous post.
He went from Heidegger, to Strauss, to Nietzsche. It's funny that both BAP and Lampert hold Heidegger in very low regard.)
One can appreciate Strauss without making any reference to BAP, though. As I said in my previous post, Strauss' students are basically the best scholars of philosophy in America. Simply put, Strauss is correct about philosophers engaging in esoteric writing and understanding this opens up vast new possibilities for appreciation of great thinkers. Arthur Melzer's book
Philosophy Between the Lines is the most accessible and convincing argument for this. I would encourage you to use the Google books preview to just read the epigrams, one from Diderot and one from Rousseau, where philosophic esotericism is taken for granted.
The effect of all this is to encourage taking a very humble and inquisitive posture when reading the great thinkers, but it also makes reading these thinkers a lot more fun, in my opinion. Strauss and Harvey Mansfield show how Machiavelli, for example, was not just a cunning Italian republican with cynical political tips, a "frustrated politician," but a lunatic aspiring cult-leader seeing himself as akin to Jesus with an ambition to completely tear down the European philosophical and political order.
As to Strauss being a "judaizer," well, yes, he was Jewish, and he held many distinctly Jewish political opinions. I gather that the people who make these kinds of actions don't care about or understand the distinction between Hellenism and Talmudic Judaism, so I'll skip past all that. Strauss supported Zionism, he disparaged the Nazis in a letter to Karl Lowith, and he delivered a ludicrous and stupid panegyric to Winston Churchill at a talk during WWII. Being slightly ethnocentric and holding flawed but understandable political opinions does not preclude one from being correct about simple scholarly questions. Have faith in your own powers of discernment to be able to read about Hobbes and Machiavelli and not get subconsciously mind-poisoned by Judaism. You can find letters where Strauss worked himself into a joyful hysteria over the beauty and subtlety of Herodotus and various other Greek thinkers; it's clear to me that he didn't view himself as opposed to, or an enemy of, white Europeans and Western Civilization.
A good place to start for Laurence Lampert, by the way, is the chapter "Nietzsche and Plato" which he wrote for
Nietzsche and Antiquity, available as a pdf on libgen.
On Strauss as corruptor: The valid Rightist criticism of Strauss is that he and his students take young men with the potential and energy to change society and convince them that being a real Nietzschean is all about belonging to an academic book club that
secretly discusses inequality but outwardly maintains liberal democracy and egalitarianism. The effect is to completely reverse and undermine Nietzsche's intent, but Strauss was able to do this because no other academic took Nietzsche seriously.
https://jaccusepaper.substack.com/p/the-...the-end-of