Meir Kahane

The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical

Shaul Magid

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691212661
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Biografie in ambito politico

The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought.Magid sheds new light on Kahane's radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the "grammar of race" as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane's theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane's thought later in life, and argues that Kahane's enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment.This incisive book shows how Kahane was a quintessentially American figure, one who adopted the radicalism of the militant Left as a tenet of Jewish survival.

1

Liberalism

MEIR KAHANE’S AMERICAN PEDIGREE: RADICALISM AND LIBERALISM IN 1960S AMERICAN JEWRY

“Indeed the JDL was the most fully American of any Jewish organization, for it tested, without anxiety, the limits of American tolerance toward Jews.”

“No Jewish leader spoke as incessantly of love for the Jewish people as Kahane did, and none so despised his fellow Jews.”

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI, MEMOIRS OF A JEWISH EXTREMIST

“We have done nothing less than revolutionize American Jewish thinking and radically change the views and activities of the American Jewish community.”

MEIR KAHANE, “A DECADE ENDS—AND BEGINS,” JEWISH PRESS, 1978 (REFLECTING ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JDL)

Kahane’s American Agenda

This book is not really about Meir Kahane, a Jew born in prewar Brooklyn who studied in the Mir Yeshiva, became a rabbi, graduated from Brooklyn College and then the NYU School of Law, had a wife and three children, and became a journalist. Rather, it is about Meir Kahane the public figure, who only really enters the scene in the spring of 1968 when New York City was reeling from a contentious public school strike in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn that brought to the surface anti-Semitic sentiments among some of the black parents and administrators.¹ The strike inspired this struggling young rabbi to found the Jewish Defense League. From that point, Kahane developed a systemic and public critique of the American Jewish establishment whose impact reached far beyond his small band of Jewish vigilantes.

There were three issues that drove Kahane’s ideological agenda in America: racism, communism, and assimilation. These were also central to the American Jewish postwar experience more generally. In each case, Kahane frames his critique as an attack on liberalism. By liberalism I do not mean the more formal definition made popular by John Locke of a political ideology that, in opposition to republicanism’s notion of “the common good” and “the public sphere,” argues for “individual liberties” and “private happiness.”² This classical liberal ideology is the foundation of America and in general Kahane would agree with it. More contemporary forms of liberalism and conservatism are really different and convergent iterations of America’s liberal-democratic ethos. When radicals disparaged liberalism in the 1960s, they were referring to a system that viewed incremental correction as preferable to revolutionary change. From that viewpoint, the inequities and injustices that existed in the present form of government could be mended while retaining the basic capitalist and imperialist system, for example, by implementing President Johnson’s Great Society program. For these radicals, the evil of liberalism was that it perpetuated injustice in the name of justice. The Black Nationalist critique of liberalism was essentially that civil rights and desegregation eventually came up against the forces of white hegemony and the structural inequalities that the liberal civil rights movement could not eradicate. The legislative successes of civil rights (e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) left in place the hegemony of white society and structural racism that no legislation could eradicate. Scholars have argued that Martin Luther King became increasingly aware of that reality as well and moved closer to Black Nationalism and issues of entrenched poverty in the last year of his life.³

Liberalism was, for Kahane, the great challenge of American Judaism, and later, the factor that was undermining the legitimacy of Zionism in Israel. But while Zionism played a role in Kahane’s early work, it is marginal in contrast to the three pillars of his American agenda. His breakout book Never Again! has only one chapter on Zionism, and it isn’t until the 1970s that Kahane gives up on America and calls for mass aliyah (which never got off the ground). On this reading, Israel for Kahane was a solution to what he viewed as the failure of the American Jewish dream, the dream that stood at the very center of his early career. And as we will see, Israel fails for him precisely because it absorbs too much of American liberalism to maintain its assertive claim to Jewish power. Even when he lived in Israel, he continued to write books in English to and about American Jews. In some way, then, Kahane’s American and Israeli careers overlap. That which makes Jewish flourishing in America impossible, liberalism, also robs Israel of its destiny as a truly Jewish state. In a feature article and interview in the Sunday New York Times Magazine in 1971, the year he emigrated to Israel, Kahane said, “When people think of Jewish defense, they automatically think of physical assault. And that’s not all we meant when we spoke of Jewish defense.” If anti-Semitism disappeared tomorrow, he said, “Jews of this country would still face decimation through assimilation, intermarriage, alienation from their background and heritage.… I don’t think there is an ethnic group in this country that is more alienated from its background and heritage than Jews are.”

I think we err if we see Kahane’s program as solely about Jewish militancy, although it was also about that.⁴ He sought to save the American dream for young American Jews. What I think he meant by that is that Jews could rise up and succeed while also retaining their distinct identity as Jews.⁵ And the true enemy of the Jews for him was not the black militants or white supremacists. Those enemies could be dealt with rather easily; the real enemy for Kahane was Jewish liberalism.⁶

To understand the overarching project of Meir Kahane, one must move beyond his call for renewed Jewish pride and fighting anti-Semitism with a fist. One must understand his radicalism and the deep and searing rift that existed between radicalism and liberalism in Jewish America, and in America more generally in the postwar era.⁷ The period examined in this chapter runs from 1965 to 1974, a time in which the mainstream liberal American Jewish community was facing challenges on numerous fronts. The chapter will focus on Kahane as a radical antiliberal American Jewish thinker at a time when almost all radical antiliberalism was coming from the far left.⁸ I will expand on my understanding of Kahane as a “radical” in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that he was an anti-incrementalist in the sense that he did not believe the liberal system could be mended enough to protect Jews. To survive, the Jews had to sever their ties with the liberal mindset that empowered them as that liberalism would eventually destroy them, not by persecution but by winnowing away any reason to remain a Jew.⁹ Ironically, Kahane emerges from liberal America, not in the mode of an impoverished black man from Oakland, but as a middle-class Jew from Brooklyn who had benefited from postwar liberalism.

Here we can see the stark incongruity of Kahane’s worldview. Liberalism made Kahane possible. His antiliberal radicalism was in a way an act of self-immolation, which he seemed to understand. The liberalism that made him possible, he surmises, could not sustain Jewish survival in a generation that had a more diluted memory of persecution. Here again the Holocaust serves as a marker. In his view, the more distant the Holocaust becomes the more liberalism threatens the American Jew. The reason is that a liberal society as he envisions it enables at least two things to occur in relation to Jews. First, the rise of ethnic minorities such as African Americans who protest discrimination, a stance he tacitly supported, will invariably produce anti-Semitism, as anti-Semitism for Kahane is an ontological reality (“Esau hates Jacob”) and not simply a product of historical circumstance. Second, liberalism increasingly offered Jews the ability to become absorbed into American society at the price of erasing their Jewishness. Without a palpable and proximate memory of the Holocaust and the liberal Weimar Republic that preceded it, Jews would easily be seduced into believing America would ultimately accept them.

While one could make a similar critique of middle-class blacks who were radicalized in the 1960s, those blacks were inheritors of centuries of slavery and racism in America while Jews were mostly protected from anti-Semitism by the liberal system Kahane derides. But we need to keep in mind that for Kahane anti-Semitism and toleration are simply two edges of the same sword that will destroy the Jews. His critique of liberalism as he understood it was in part an adaptation of the mindset of Black Nationalism, combining anti-integrationism and Malcom X’s famous adage “by any means necessary” that was born from disempowerment and persecution. And in part this reflected his fantasy of the Irgun terrorist/freedom fighter who refused to succumb to the dictates of British rule in Palestine. Liberalism gave Jews freedom. But to survive, the Jews needed power.

Kahane contributed a number of things to what would later become part of the Jewish mainstream in the following decades: first, the popularization of the idea that anti-Semitism was pervasive in America; second, the use of religion as a tool of pride;¹⁰ and third, the breaking of the bond between liberalism and Jews that had persisted since the beginning of the twentieth century. Pervasive anti-Semitism helped with the popularization of Israel in the American imagination; Zionizing American Jewry was a way to keep anti-Semitism in play. We can see that today in the debate about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and the voices that claim anti-Zionism is simply another form of anti-Semitism. Religion helped launch the kiruv (Orthodox Jewish outreach) movement; and the questioning of the linkage between Jews and liberalism (which was also happening at around the same time with the New York Intellectuals and Commentary) emerged a bit later in the role of Jews in neoconservatism.

This is not to suggest that mainstream American Jewry was directly influenced by Kahane in all these ways, although I will argue that the influences were far greater than usually considered. Rather, it is to say that Kahane’s real influence came from his American context and what he determined were the three things that most threatened Jews in America. The question of violence is important and played a prominent role in Kahane’s thinking for a variety of reasons; I examine that subject in another chapter. Here I will just say that Kahane adopted violence as a tactic in America (even if in Israel it morphed into something else) and that he largely absorbed the general violent tenor of the radicalism of that period, much of which he borrowed, often with proper attribution.

Kahane was adept at the exercise of power and identity—or power through identity—that was once the province of ethnic minorities. The works of white nationalists such as Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, Richard Spencer, and even arguably Steve Bannon and the alt-right are expressions of the first pangs of anxiety in white Christian America over its coming minority status.¹¹ Advocating separatist and ethnocentric political solutions was common among anxious ethnic groups, including Jews. Kahane was a major representative of that tendency among Jews to the consternation of the Jewish establishment, who largely remained committed to the liberal state’s role in protecting Jews from ethnic animus and violence. But even liberals such as Leonard Fine began to see the limits of liberal solutions. In 1972 he wrote, “The last decade of cacophony has effectively destroyed the simple, somewhat simple-minded, liberal myth of this first half of this century.… Among many lessons we are now beginning to learn is that even with the best of will and the mostly amply funded of government programs, group conflict persists.”¹²

Charles Liebman, in his 1973 book The Ambivalent American Jew, offers a slightly different take on Jews and liberalism in postwar America. Far from being a gesture to the universal, Liebman argues that liberalism for Jews in America was a way for them, largely as Jews and with other Jews, to unite and champion non-Jewish causes. “Jews prefer to get together with other Jews to promote ostensibly non-Jewish enterprises (which assist Jewish acceptance) and then to pretend the whole matter has nothing to do with being Jewish.”¹³ For Liebman, Jewish liberalism is the expression of the ongoing tension between survival and integration that informs the American Jewish experience; it enables the Jew to express universalism while doing so as an exercise in survival. And yet, in his conclusion, Liebman maintains that the project is doomed to failure because the tension cannot be sustained, or because what Jews would need to do “to redefine [their] religion and the nature of [their] commitment … and the extent to which the Jew perceives anti-Semitism from the Left” would push the survival option to the fore. In large part, I think his prediction was correct. For many American Jews, sustaining Jewish liberalism for the Jew who is committed to Jewish survival has proved to be just too difficult. Kahane, who had a much simpler view of liberalism and its defects, intuitively understood quite early on the dangers Liebman described.

As one committed to the survival of the group at all costs, Kahane regarded liberalism as the enemy of the Jews. The Jews’ commitment to liberalism, against their own collective interest, was in his view an act of repugnant self-hatred that was rooted in anxiety but sparked resentment. Liberalism sought to ameliorate resentment by claiming that the social and political system should not foc...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Archives Consulted
• Introduction. Why Kahane?
• 1. Liberalism. Meir Kahane’s American Pedigree: Radicalism and Liberalism in 1960s American Jewry
• 2. Radicalism. Radical Bedfellows: Meir Kahane and the “New Jews” in the Late 1960s
• 3. Race and Racism. Kahane on Race and Judeo-Pessimism
• 4. Communism. Vietnam and Soviet Jewry: Kahane’s Battle against Communism
• 5. Zionism. Kahane’s Zionism: The Political Experiment of Abnormality and Its Tragic Demise
• 6. Militant Post-Zionist Apocalypticism. Kahane’s The Jewish Idea
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index