Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an
American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid, Princeton University Press, 2021,
296 pages.
I hesitated to broach this book because I anticipated it would be a hatchet job. Left-leaning academics are not known for admitting that "Kahane was right" in his assessments. As a card-carrying JDL member from 1969-1973, I felt that phase of his career deserved an appreciative albeit not uncritical evaluation. He was then right about a lot. Having overcome my hesitancy, I can report that Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical is a valuable treatment, an intellectual biography, of the militant rabbi's ideas.
Magid is religiously and academically well-equipped for the
undertaking; a professor of Judaic Studies at Dartmouth College, he lived in
Israel and served in the IDF. He has a classic religious education and was
ordained as an Orthodox rabbi. Today he holds the pulpit of the egalitarian
Fire Island Synagogue. His is a substantive work with much to offer, providing you
swallow his condescending asides (such as describing Kahane as a "middlebrow
thinker") and permeating wokeness. For me, the reward outstrips any
discomfiture. He also characterizes Kahane as a "reactive thinker"
with short-term goals and weak follow-through. That is closer to the mark.
A central thesis of the book is that Kahane was a
quintessentially American personality, the Israel stage of his career included. He saw Israel through an American lens and as suffering from the toxicity of US values. His intellectual battle was foremost against liberalism, first in America and
then in Israel. What kind of liberalism? One that is defined by tolerance, humanist
values, cross-cultural pollination, modernity, secularism, and majority rule constrained
by overarching democratic values. In Israel, these foreign implants are to be uprooted. In line with New Left radicals with
whom he had a love-hate relationship (they liked each other's tactics but
disagreed over aims), Kahane rejected liberalism's notion that reforming the political system was
desirable and could best be achieved through incrementalism and consensus
building.
***
I joined JDL because it was the only group prepared to
counter the street-level antisemitism I encountered on Manhattan’s Lower East
Side. It was beside the point to differentiate between ordinary crime and violent antisemitism.
New York City was a dangerous, uncivilized place with 1,000+ murders a year
(starting in 1969 and abating only in 1996). Cemeteries were desecrated,
synagogues firebombed, and observant Jews were targeted. So when Kahane, Burt
Zweibon, and Mort Dolinsky founded a Jewish Defense League in 1968 to patrol
Jewish neighborhoods and beat back Jew-hating hooligans – primarily blacks and
Puerto Ricans – I saw this as a good thing.
Magid does not deny the visceral nature of black antisemitism.
Still, he tries to contextualize it, suggesting that maybe as in Brooklyn's
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, it was rooted in misunderstanding and miscommunication
on both sides. Ocean Hill-Brownsville is where in 1968, a Ford Foundation
social experiment went awry. The idea was to give local parents control over
their neighborhood's schools, budget, and hiring. The activist parents and the school
district superintendent they hired wanted the mostly Jewish teachers replaced, arguing
that the predominantly black school population could best learn from teachers
who looked more like them. The liberal Jewish head of the teachers union, Albert
Shanker (1928 – 1997), who had campaigned down south for Negro rights, found
himself and his teachers bashed for being "white" Jews.
In 1969, James Foreman helped draft a demand that churches
(and synagogues) pay reparations to black people for America's legacy of
slavery. Foreman had been a bigwig with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (which
Jews had helped organize and fund until they were pressured to leave) and the Black
Panther Party, a racial supremacist group originally formed to protect blacks from police violence. When Temple Emanu-El, a progressive
Reform congregation on Manhattan's tony Fifth Avenue, invited Forman to make
his reparations pitch, JDL showed up to block his way. This was done not to
defend Emanu-El (which, in Kahane's view, didn't deserve it) but to make a
broader statement against black intimidation and liberal Jewish cravenness.
Foreman wisely stayed away.
***
Magid explains Kahane believed that Jew-hatred was "endemic
to gentile society" – as in "Esau hates Jacob." That liberalism erroneously presumed antisemitism could be made to disappear by inculcating tolerance and coexistence
(such as through mandated Holocaust education in municipal schools). Liberalism's
other fatal flaw, as Kahane saw it, was that it undermined Jewish continuity by
fostering out-marriage. Magid denigrates such demographic concerns (which the Jewish
establishment belatedly adopted) as "survivalism." Early on, Kahane correctly pointed to the phenomenon whereby progressive Jews conflated Judaism with
liberalism. He took fair aim at a Jewish establishment that advocated bussing of
inner-city black pupils and opposed designating NYC public housing for observant
Jews while sending their own children to exclusive private schools and living
in affluent lily white suburban communities. He condemned their philanthropic
spending on non-Jewish causes, such as urban community centers and hospitals that did not
serve Jews. He dammed them for ignoring Jewish poverty. JDL helped drive
changes in all these areas.
Magid gives us a chapter on Kahane's understanding of – you
should forgive the expression – the intersectionality between communism,
the Vietnam War (which he supported), the Arab-Israel conflict, and the freedom
for Soviet Jewry movement (which he helped spotlight). He saw the antiwar
movement as a Trojan Horse for world communism and its liberal pro-Israel
supporters as dupes who did not realize that with a Viet Cong victory, the
movement's energies would be turned against Israel. It was.
JDL turned its focus to the plight of millions of Jews in the Soviet Union who could not live as Jews yet were prevented from leaving. When he was not invited to strategize about Soviet Jewry at the February 1971 conference of Jewish movers and shakers in Brussels, he burst in anyway and got himself arrested, which was precisely what he wanted. Kahane was not only a gifted writer, investigator, and organizer, he was a master of publicity (and, as Brussels showed, self-promotion). In March 1971, he organized a mass rally in Washington for Soviet Jewry. Magid reports, "Over five thousand people showed up" and sat in the street. "Many heartfelt stories were told about Jewish teenagers calling their parents to ask permission to be arrested." My mother, who distrusted larger-than-life, conceited personalities no matter how charismatic, said nope. But even without me, the DC police had never before arrested so many kids for (genuinely) nonviolent civil disobedience.
Then in Magid's telling, things fell apart. On January 27, 1972, the offices of Sol Hurok Enterprises, which brought over Soviet talent to perform in the US, were bombed, killing a young Jewish female employee. Kahane was in Israel at the time. He had moved there in 1971, dividing his time between the two countries. He had intended to establish an international JDL headquartered in Jerusalem but immediately turned his attention to running for the Knesset. The JDL was left rudderless. Kahane had encouraged his followers to engage in violence, often leaving them to their own devices.
(Photo: Washington, DC sit-down for Soviet Jewry. I am the one waving.)
***
Kahane went through seismic personal, political, and theological
transitions throughout his life. He is remembered chiefly for where he ended
up. "In Israel, Kahane's radicalism expressed through his rejection of
Zionism as 'normalcy' – that is, to be 'like all the other nations.' He
believed this was a trap that had plagued the entire Zionist project and would
ultimately cause its collapse," writes Magid. He strenuously opposed Israel’s
democratic political system. And he latched on to opposing Arab-Israel dating (as if this is a pressing issue).
And he became the leading advocate of violent apocalyptic
post-Zionism. Kahane, whose father Charles hosted Zionist firebrand Ze’ev Jabotinsky
(1880-1940) and had himself been a member of Betar, repudiated Jabotinsky’s
classical liberalism and cosmopolitanism. As Magid reveals, he also rejected the
religious nationalism of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. It
was too mystical, optimistic, and accepting of the non-Orthodox to his taste.
In Magid's words, Kahane's quest was for an abnormal insular
state. "To be isolated is not to be alone. The greater the isolation of
the Jew, the greater the awe of G-d's ultimate victory. The more we stand 'alone'
and the less who stand with us, the more astonishing is G-d's majesty,"
Kahane wrote. This is why his followers today not only don't fear a global war
with Muslim civilization over sacrifices on the Temple Mount, don't care if Washington ends
its military aid and diplomatic backing of Israel, don't fear a bloody third
intifada, and are unconcerned over the prospect the country's economy and its financial
system might disintegrate – they anticipate positively such calamities as openings
to force the hand of God and His redemption. You can't make a messianic omelet without cracking some eggs.
In contrast to the principles of Herzlian Zionism, Kahane's vision for Israel – in many ways, today's Hardal
picture, too – is of an Israel where Jews and non-Jews are separated. It is a post-Zionist
theology that understands Israel's creation as a punishment to the Gentiles. The
burden, though, is on Israel. Magid explains: "Either the Jews do God's
bidding by destroying the gentile, or God will destroy the Jews."
***
After multiple attempts, Kahane's Kach Party won one seat in the Israeli Knesset in 1984. Its platform included revoking the citizenship of non-Jewish Israelis, banning marriages between Jews and non-Jews, imposing fundamentalist Halacha on the citizenry, and expelling Israel's Arab population. Kahane knew – as only a fanatic possibly can – that this was precisely what God wanted. To wit: "G-d longs for this trust in Him, which will lead Israel to isolation and to relying on G-d. This, in turn, will open the gates of kiddush Hashem."
In 1985, the Knesset amended a Basic Law to include anti-racism; it expelled
Kahane, and its decision was upheld by the Supreme Court.
Today's "Jewish and democratic" mantra came into being
as a reaction to Kahane in an amendment to the Basic Law passed in 1985
(9:7/A). Magid takes a swipe at Israel's Declaration of Independence by
pointing out that it does not explicitly mention "democracy." In my
reading, democracy is presumed and implied by Israel's founders:
We hereby declare that as from
the termination of the Mandate at midnight, this night of the fourteenth to the
fifteenth of May 1948, and until the setting up of the duly elected bodies of
the State in accordance with a Constitution, to be drawn up by a Constituent
Assembly not later than the first day of October 1948, the present National
Council shall act as the Provisional State Council, and its executive organ,
the National Administration, shall constitute the Provisional Government of the
State of Israel.
Regrettably, the Orthodox parties blocked – as they still do
– progress toward a written constitution.
As much as I have lately thought about how Hardalism and how it has combined the worst of two
Meir Kahane, in his final intellectual phase, denounced modern
Orthodoxy as culturally defiled and Herzlian Zionism as a Hillul ha-Shem. Of course, what makes modern Orthodoxy 'modern' is precisely its willingness to engage with the larger culture. But for him, ethno-purity and separatism is the goal. This requires the removal of
non-Jews, their churches, and mosques from the Holy Land. He also wanted Jews to embrace
revenge and violence as positive commandments. Israel's duty is to obliterate the
sources of Hillul-ha-Shem. The Arabs personify Hillul-ha-Shem. So do Jewish
liberals.
***
The government's campaign to "overhaul" Israel's judiciary is something Kahane might adjudge as an excellent first step, a prerequisite to achieving the insular illiberal Israel he envisioned. He would have viewed Yariv Levin and Binyamin Netanyahu as useful tools. Our prime minister egotistically supposes he can calibrate regime change; take it so far (to stay out of prison) but no further (avoid bringing down the Third Commonwealth). For now, a united front of the neo-Kahanist Hardal parties, venal haredi parties, and Bibi's illiberal Likud serves everyone's interests.
Kahane was a man of ideas – some repulsive, others spot on –
and foremost, a demagogue par excellence. He would have reveled in the
tropes of Israel's alt-right; the scapegoating of "Ashkenazim,"
"elites," Supreme Court justices, Aharon Barak, and the vote-stealing "leftist
media." He would have been impressed by how a government in power can portray
itself as the victim of a vast global conspiracy. Nevertheless, in the final
analysis, he'd have little mercy for Netanyahu. I can imagine Meir Kahane,
who knew a thing or two about Lenin, muttering, "With G-d's help, those tref-eating,
bareheaded, homosexual-endorsing Zionist-Hellenists will sell us the rope with
which we will hang them."
