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Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, by Shaul Magid, (Princeton University Press, 2021), 296 pages.
Meir Kahane died as he had lived: violently. On November 5, 1990, El Sayyid Nosair, a Muslim radical, gunned down the rabbi as he spoke at a Manhattan lodge. In Israel, 150,000 folks attended Kahane’s funeral whereas hundreds lined Brooklyn’s streets. One New York rabbi remarked, “This shot was fired at all Jews.” In loss of life, Kahane attained the respect that eluded him in life.
Kahane launched the Jewish Defense League within the spring of 1968 as a response to spiraling crime and heightened racial tensions. Jewish pleasure and “Never Again” had been the JDL’s dominant messages. In the Big Apple, identitarian militancy was commonplace fare. The Black Power motion, Puerto Rican nationalism, the Irish Republican Army, all had a toehold. Now it was the Jews’ flip. Tribalism begot extra tribalism.
By the mid-Seventies, Kahane had chalked up a legal rap sheet and convictions on weapons and explosives prices. He moved to Israel, the place he grew to become a one-man faction within the Knesset. Against the backdrop of the primary Intifada, Kahane was barred from looking for reelection on the grounds that he had run afoul of Israel’s Basic Law, which had been amended to ban the registration of events that incite racism. (As destiny would have it, the prime minister on the time, Yitzhak Shamir, had a hand in plotting the assassinations of Britain’s Lord Moyne and Sweden’s Count Folk Bernadotte within the Nineteen Forties.)
With Meir Kahane, Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish research at Dartmouth and an ordained rabbi, makes an attempt to carry context to his topic. The guide is easily written, and Magid possesses a command of his remit. The writer has digested Kahane’s intensive writings and benefited from enter from Kahane’s spouse.
Magid can also be a seeker, and his curiosity shines on the web page. A youthful Magid undertook a non secular quest of his personal, one which led him to Crown Heights and Borough Park, Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish enclaves. There, admiration for Kahane was a coin of the realm. Repeatedly, Magid expresses his discomfort with Kahane’s mien and far of his message, however he acknowledges that Kahane left an indelible mark on American Jewry at the same time as his reminiscence is dulled with the passing of time.
Kahane was robust. “Every Jew with a .22” was greater than a menacing slogan. Kahane made weapons coaching a tenet of Jewish manhood, which Magid suggests was a Jewish analog of “the Protestant masculinity of American religion.” The biography captures the rabbi’s resentments and synthesizes what emerges as Kahane’s close to-apocalyptic theology. The legal guidelines of countries weren’t meant for Israel. Sanctification lay in separation, and a clenched fist.
To him, God’s glory within the right here and now was made manifest by Israel’s defiance. The Messiah would undoubtedly come, Kahane preached, however whether or not the Jews could be kicking and screaming on the End of Days was of their fingers. Kahane equated passivity and quietism with the desecration of God’s Name. They had been the unhappy patrimony of galus, the Exile, a deep wound to the Deity and His People.
Kahane positioned renewed emphasis on the Tanakh on the expense of rabbinic writings. Over the course of two millennia, the Bible got here to be muted via the lenses of neighborhood, custom, and customized, the mesorah. But it was the Torah that first enshrined the Promise of the Land to Abraham, made the conquest of Canaan crucial, and valorized the Israelites’ triumphs.
Kahane’s recasting of texts was understanding and intentional. Magid stresses that Kahane was the product of years of rigorous non secular schooling. For grade college, he attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, then Yeshivah University for Boys High School. He then studied Talmud on the Mirrer Yeshivah, a storied Eastern European establishment transplanted to the New World through Shanghai. He additionally held a legislation diploma, although he by no means handed the bar examination.
On paper, Kahane’s credentials marked him as Modern Orthodox, however his message was hardly bourgeois. He was a font of resentment and hostility. Kahane may by no means be confused with Jared Kushner (Harvard) or Joe Lieberman (Yale). He loathed the “establishment.” He concluded that liberalism’s emphasis on individualism endangered Jewish communal cohesion and doubled as a springboard to assimilation. Kahane heaped scorn on the Jews of Scarsdale and Great Neck, discovering them woefully out of contact with their roots. His tackle suburban bar mitzvahs was cruel, heavy on “bar,” much less on “mitzvah.”
Kahane’s fears had been premised upon his understanding of social buildings. He seen Jews as located halfway between WASPdom and the interior metropolis, susceptible to blowback or worse from each side of the divide. The taxonomy of Albion’s Seed was irrelevant to Kahane’s calculus. It was all the time them v. us, “Esau hates Jacob.” Millennia made no distinction.
Magid writes that Kahane “often viewed social conflict in ‘class’ terms that pitted many of his child-of-immigrant underclass followers—his lumpenproletariat—against the American establishment.” On that rating, Kahane was a hero to the numerous working- and center-class Jews of town’s outer boroughs. For them, the scars of the Holocaust had been significantly contemporary, intermarriage was treason, and upward mobility appeared distant. The idyllic existence described by David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise, the place academic attainment trumped ethnicity and faith, was Kahane’s nightmare.
Early on, Magid describes Kahane as a “quintessential American, even decades after emigrating to Israel.” Later, he labels Kahane “a quintessential American Jew.” The adjective “quintessential” and the noun “American” seem misplaced. Kahane doesn’t seem to have been a U.S. citizen on the time of his homicide. Just just a few years earlier, he had renounced his U.S. citizenship in a failed effort to retain his seat within the Knesset. Magid acknowledges that Kahane had “largely rejected America, his country of birth,” however omits this further step.
The authorized tussle that surrounded Kahane’s citizenship really grew to become a flashpoint, first with the Reagan administration after which inside Israel. When he joined the Knesset, the U.S. State Department regarded Kahane as having forfeited his standing as an American, regardless of Kahane’s protestations on the contrary. A federal courtroom sustained Kahane’s authorized place however not earlier than it scolded him as “a hypocrite, for telling people that they should do as he says and not as he does.” In the courtroom’s view, the federal government had failed to fulfill its authorized burden beneath the 14th Amendment, which requires overt expression to ensure that citizenship conferred by delivery to be surrendered.
For its half, Israel enacted laws requiring Knesset members to be residents of a single nation. To keep politically viable, Kahane executed the mandatory paperwork, to Foggy Bottom’s glee. Then, when Israel barred “racists” from Knesset membership, Kahane tried to retrieve his patrimony. The U.S. authorities wasn’t shopping for, and a federal courtroom upheld its determination. “Kahane voluntarily and deliberately selected one course of action over another,” Judge Barrington Parker wrote. “Under the circumstances, he cannot have it both ways.”
Kahane was a person for his instances. He gave voice to American Jewry’s insecurities and fears however didn’t see its arc. Orthodoxy continued to develop, together with the variety of Jews of no denominational affiliation. Israel is at peace with two of its instant neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, in addition to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Start-up Nation is a actuality. For the second, anyway, Kahane’s apocalypse is at bay.
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