Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid

Abstract

Reviewed by: Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid Nancy Sinkoff Shaul Magid. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. When Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932–1990) founded the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968 as a response to the showdown between advocates of community control in New York City’s public schools, who were mostly Black—as were the students—and the union membership of the United Federation of Teachers, who were mostly white and Jewish, in the legendary Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of that same year, the slogan “Never Again!” became the organization’s rallying cry. This call to arms, which directly invoked the destruction of European Jewry to galvanize American Jews to reject the communal politics that Kahane considered feckless, pathetic, and emasculating, was not merely symbolic. Rather, Kahane hoped, American Jewish activists would take one page out of the confrontational playbook of the Black Panthers and Young Lords and another out of the performative playbook of the Yippies and embrace a politics that expressed hadar (Jewish [End Page 231] pride) through physical toughness to defend Jews in their neighborhoods and to counteract the lure of assimilation, in short, to write a script for Jewish survival in urban America. In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Shaul Magid seeks to restore Kahane and his ideas to the postwar American landscape, to explain his militancy, and, in so doing, to unsettle the narrative of American Jewish history that has been characterized by a preoccupation with the “cult of synthesis”—Jonathan Sarna’s phrase—the belief that the American Jewish experience has been a triumph of consensus between liberal American and Jewish values. Magid also wants to redress the misconception that American Jewish radicalism only lived among activists on the Left. In fact, it was postwar America that nurtured Kahane’s right-wing radicalism. Though Kahane was disavowed by most, but not all, American Jewish leaders before his immigration to Israel in 1971, and though his party, Kach, was ultimately barred from the Knesset, his views, argues Magid, have had a profound afterlife in contemporary Jewish life. (The fact that Otzmah Yehudit/Jewish Power, the heir apparent to Kach, won six seats in the 2022 Knesset elections, proves Magid’s point.) Meir Kahane is thus not only a cultural biography of Kahane, but also a cautionary exposé of his ideas’ lasting influence. A scholar of Jewish thought, Magid chose to narrate Kahane’s life by examining his somewhat unsystematic, even contradictory, ideas through six chapters, “Liberalism,” “Radicalism,” “Race and Racism,” “Communism,” “Zionism,” and “Militant Post-Zionist Apocalypticism.” In Magid’s analysis, their overarching consistency was Kahane’s critique of postwar American Jewish “liberalism,” and the book successfully roots Kahane’s preoccupations with Jewish survival in the American Diaspora and his program for transforming what he viewed as a doomed secular Zionist project in Israel as a response to this critique. Born in 1932, reared in an Orthodox home, and educated until he was thirteen at a Mir yeshiva, Kahane’s childhood was informed by the Holocaust consciousness that pervaded his Borough Park survivor neighborhood. Kahane studied law at New York University, worked as a journalist, founded a Jewish summer camp that taught martial arts, and, engaging with the issues that rocked American and Jewish society in the 1960s (civil rights and racial reckoning, anticommunism, Israel’s victory in 1967, the plight of Soviet Jewry, and urban decay), fashioned himself as an activist prophet against the American Jewish establishment. Kahane embraced violence as a necessary means to effect social change. “Every Jew a .22” was his brand (8) and he and his squad of disenfranchised street Jews reacted to the political crises of their day by creating citizens’ patrols to protect elderly, poor Jews on Brooklyn’s streets, threatening to meet a Black nationalist activist demanding reparations at Temple Emanu-El with lead pipes, disrupting performances of Soviet dancers, breaking into Jewish communal leadership meetings, and taking out hyperbolic ads critical of the Jewish establishment’s alleged failure to defend...