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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Ghost That Stalks the American Jewish Establishment
On the unacknowledged legacy of violent Jewish nationalist Meir Kahane

This week's Altercation is (mainly) authored by the extremely prolific
Shaul Magid , professor
of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, Kogod senior research fellow at
the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and rabbi of the Fire
Island Synagogue in Seaview, New York. It draws on the research and
arguments of his new book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political
Thought of an American Jewish Radical
,
though its contents are original to Altercation.

When people today hear the name Meir Kahane, most think about the
militant and racist rabbi turned Israeli politician who founded a
political party in Israel, was elected to the Knesset in 1984, and was
removed in 1987 under the "Racism Law" legislated just for him,
which made his party illegal. Many may be familiar with his policy to
transfer Arabs out of Israel, his belief that Israel can't be both
Jewish and democratic, and his critique of left-wing secular Israelis,
calling them "Hebrew speaking goyim."

Those more familiar with Israel may be aware of the ubiquitous "Kahane
was Right" graffiti that dotted the landscape, especially after the
second intifada in 2000, the emergence of a series of Israeli
politicians who still view Kahane as a mentor, and the rise of small but
vocal neo-Kahanist vigilante groups that terrorize Arab civilians in the
name of Kahane's vision of what a "Jewish" state means. There are
very few in Israel who are not familiar with the term "Kahane" or
"Kahanism" and what that implies. His funeral in Israel in 1990 was
one of the largest in the history of the country.

In contemporary America, however, things are very different. Kahane is
almost a persona non grata in the American Jewish conversation, and when
his name is mentioned, it is usually in regard to something in Israel.
Ironically, Kahane's career began in America with the founding the
Jewish Defense League in May 1968, and by early 1970 he had all but
hijacked the Soviet Jewry movement through his call for civil
disobedience and even violence to persuade Russia to free its Jewish
dissidents. He testified before Congress about Soviet Jewry in June
1968. In March 1971, he organized a rally in D.C. for Soviet Jewry that
was the largest rally ever held at the White House. He was the subject
of long articles in Esquire and The New York Times Magazine, and was a
feature interview in Playboy in 1972. JDL chapters sprang forth in many
cities across the country, and his Soviet Jewry activism was the subject
of a White House discussion between President Nixon and the Soviet
ambassador. In 1971, a Look magazine poll showed that about 25 percent
of American Jews had a positive view of the JDL. Kahane was not a
marginal figure but a national one. It is likely that between 1968 and
1973 he was mentioned in The New York Times more often than any other
rabbi in America.

So why do we know so little about Kahane in America? Jonathan Sarna's
comprehensive book American Judaism does not mention him or the JDL at
all. This is no oversight. There has been a marked attempt among
scholars and institutional Judaism more generally to erase Kahane from
American Jewish history.

Perhaps that's because Kahane's American record includes leading an
organization that committed several murders. In 1985, regional offices
of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee were bombed; the
bombing in Santa Ana, California, killed ADC official Alex Odeh. Irv
Rubin, the head of the Los Angeles branch of the JDL, publicly
celebrated the killing, and eventually several JDL members were
convicted of murders of other Arab Americans, while JDL members whom the
FBI posted rewards for in Odeh's killing remain free in Israel. Rubin
died in prison awaiting trial for other violent acts. The JDL credo that
set it apart from other far-right American Jewish organizations was its
embrace of deadly violence.

Despite that, the ultranationalism of Kahane's worldview has seeped
deep into the collective subconscious of American Jewry. We simply
cannot tell the story of postwar American Jewry without Meir Kahane.

To get at what I am arguing, we must distinguish between two things:
Kahane's tactics and Kahane's worldview. Kahane's tactics were
very much a product of his time; the culture and race wars of the late
1960s, the radicalism of the New Left that led many young
first-generation Jews to radicalize and adopt radical politics for
Jewish causes after the New Left became anti-Israel after 1967.
Kahane's militarism was a reflection of those years, even if his
American followers proved to be a good deal more deadly than any wing of
the New Left.

His worldview, however, was something different. It was an amalgam of
Cold War anti-communism, an attack on American liberalism, and a
systemic critique of the moderate nature of a mainstream Jewish
establishment that was wary of "making trouble." He challenged the
regnant belief that liberalism and moderation would save the American
Jewish dream. Interestingly, Kahane's early program was a diasporist
one and not focused on Israel at all. An early JDL manifesto claimed the
organization sought to "save the American dream" for Jews by
instilling in its youth an assertive and activist program to fight
assimilation, anti-Semitism, and intermarriage.

His belief in the ubiquity of anti-Semitism in America was strongly
resisted by the American Jewish establishment, and most American Jews.
His belief that liberalism had no answer to intermarriage was similarly
contested. He wrote a book on intermarriage in 1974, Why Be Jewish?,
when few Jews were writing about intermarriage. Based on the 1972 sitcom
Bridget Loves Bernie, he called American Judaism "Bernism." He
lamented the American bar mitzvah ("all bar, no mitzvah") and
offered a Judaism of the street before there was a social justice
movement. When American Jews were still worried mostly about
anti-Semitism on the right, he claimed anti-Semitism on the left was
more threatening, and in the 1970s he argued that anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism were identical at a time when few made that connection.
Kahane argued against Black nationalism the way some Jews today argue
against critical race theory. In the late 1960s, he argued Jews were not
responsible for whatever had happened to American Blacks, at a time when
many liberal Jews favored reparations. Today, Kahane's view on
reparations can be heard in many quarters of the "moderate" Jewish
world.

On these and other issues, what Kahane was saying about American Jewry
in the late 1960s and 1970s is what many mainstream Jews are saying in
2020. If we remove Kahane's militant tactics, his general worldview is
alive and well. He founded Camp Jedel where Jews could learn to shoot
guns "as Jews." Today, some American Jews proudly send their
children to the IDF military Gadna program, where American Jews learn to
shoot guns "as Jews." In some way, what Kahane wanted was to
transfer Israeli survivalism to American shores. In the 1980s, Kahane
argued that a "Jewish and democratic" state was "schizophrenic."
Today, faced with a half-century occupation, some Jews are questioning
whether democracy should be sacrosanct if it challenges a "Jewish"
state.

In short, if we separate tactics from worldview, Kahane has seeped into
the collective subconscious of American Jewry more than we are willing
to admit. In Israel, facing up to Kahanism is easier as it is more open
and thus more a part of the conversation. The attempt to erase
Kahane's legacy in America makes it much more difficult to recognize
and confront. Many want to see him as a persona non grata. And therein
lies the danger. The neoconservatism that emerged after Kahane was gone
has been partly responsible for the rightward shift in some of American
Jewry. But Kahanism lurks just beneath the surface. Someone once said
that even though Kahane left America, America never left Kahane. I would
add that in the collective mind of much of American Jewry, Kahane lives
on in many of the moderate and genteel discussions about Jewish survival
today.

Odds and Ends

I see that that Rabbi/Professor Magid is also
a "clawhammer
banjo player and a student of Ken Perlman, one of the great living banjo
virtuosos and musicologists of old-time banjo as well as the musical
partner of Al Jabour who was, until his death a few years ago, the
curator of American folk music at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C."
There are a few people in this world who have too much talent to be
accorded to a single person. It's just not fair. I had this thought
twice in the past week, once when I was reading about Jhumpa Lahiri
and again when I was
reading about Viet Thanh Nguyen
. Both are significant
scholars as well as brilliant authors of fiction. (Of course, they are
also terrific, albeit unnecessary, arguments for the value of an open
immigration policy.) I've not read Lahiri's new novel, Whereabouts
,
originally written, infuriatingly to mere mortals, in Italian, a
language she recently decided to learn, but I did read Nguyen's
magnificent two novels and can recommend them unreservedly. Start with
The Sympathizer

before moving on to The Committed
.

We can't solve many of the world's problems all by ourselves here at
Altercation, but one I think we can dispose of is the sad fact that many
people think Tom Jones is lame. Well, think again after you have watched
Tom sing "Long Time Gone
" with Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young; "Raise Your Hand
" with Janis Joplin;
"Burning Down the House
" with the Cardigans;
and, more recently, Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song
" all by himself.

Finally, what the world needs now, no less than love sweet love, are
conservatives who have a sense of honor and devote themselves to tell
the truth, regardless of where it may lead. There are just a few of
these left and we lost one with the passing of Yale historian (and
Brooklyn College alumnus) Donald Kagan
,
whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is one of the great
scholarly achievements of the past half-century.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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