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

294 Pages·2021·5.815 MB·English

by  Shaul Magid

meir kahane

Meir Kahane
the public life and
po liti cal thought of an
american jewish radical
Shaul Magid
prince ton university press
prince ton & oxford
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Magid, Shaul, 1958- author.
Title: Meir Kahane : an American Jewish radical / Shaul Magid.
Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021002987 | ISBN 9780691179339 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780691212661 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kahane, Meir. | Rabbis—New York (State)—New York—Biography |
Political activists—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Rabbis—
Israel—Biography. | Political activists—Israel—Biography.
Classification: LCC BM755.K254 M34 2021 | DDC 328.5694/092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002987
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
Editorial: Fred Appel and James Collier
Production Editorial: Ellen Foos
Jacket Design: Pamela Schnitter
Production: Erin Suydam
Publicity: Kate Hensley and Kathryn Stevens
Copyeditor: P. David Hornik
Jacket image: Meir Kahane outside of the New York Board of Rabbis office,
10 East 73rd Street, New York, June 29, 1970. AP Photo / Harry Harris
This book has been composed in Arno
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Aryeh Cohen
קדצ לש לייח
Warrior for Justice

contents
Acknowl edgments ix
Introduction. Why Kahane? 1
1 Liberalism. Meir Kahane’s American Pedigree:
Radicalism and Liberalism in 1960s American Jewry 15
2 Radicalism. Radical Bedfellows: Meir Kahane and the
“New Jews” in the Late 1960s 53
3 Race and Racism. Kahane on Race and Judeo- Pessimism 75
4 Communism. Vietnam and Soviet Jewry: Kahane’s Battle
against Communism 107
5 Zionism. Kahane’s Zionism: The Po liti cal Experiment of
Abnormality and Its Tragic Demise 125
6 Militant Post- Zionist Apocalypticism. Kahane’s The Jewish Idea 159
Conclusion 191
Notes 203
Bibliography 243
Index 263
vii

acknowl edgments
it is often difficult to determine when precisely a book proj ect begins. This
book arguably began in my office at Indiana University Bloomington in a con-
versation with a gradua te student, Matthew Brittingham, who proposed to
write an MA thesis on history and memory in the work of Meir Kahane, an
idea that emerged from a brief discussion of Kahane and the Holocaust in my
book American Post- Judaism. Intrigued by the idea, we set up a few hours a
week to read through much of Kahane’s written work chronologically, from
short newspaper articles in the early 1960s to his published books through the
late 1980s. Matt eventually wrote an excellent thesis, but I was also changed by
the experience. I came to realize that Kahane was more than a militant rabbi
and gadfly in American and later Israeli society; he represented a par tic u lar
kind of reactionary and radical critique of the liberal establishment of postwar
Amer i ca that has gone largely unexplored. Although the counterculture often
claims the moniker of radicalism in that period, I came to see a form of radical-
ism in Kahane’s worldview as well, one that used the tactics of the far left in
the ser vice of a right- wing critique of American Jewry.
Thus began a six- year journey in which I took up residence inside Kahane’s
head as he lived inside mine. I strug gled with making intellectual sense of a
middlebrow thinker who did not express himself in a register that was easy to
analyze and take seriously in an academic study. And yet over time I began to
see that Kahane’s often rambling, incendiary, and always provocative writing
reflected not only a reactionary mood but held together as an intellectual proj-
ect, a critique of liberalism both in the US and in Israel. Questions of liberal-
ism, radicalism, race, Jewish identity and pride, and the status of Israel stood
at the very center of Kahane’s writing from the 1960s through the 1980s—
issues that remain relevant t oday fifty years l ater. Once settling in Israel his
attention turned to his nascent po liti cal career (which ended in disaster), but
he never lifted his gaze from Amer i ca and continued to weigh in on American
Jewry and Judaism, their future and their demise.
ix
x acknowl edgments
In the midst of working on Kahane’s published writings I was fortunate to
receive an NEH Se nior Research Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History
in Manhattan, which contained a series of archives that would change the di-
rection of my work. I want to thank my friend and colleague David Myers, who
was the director of the center that year. David has been a constant friend and
source of support in this and other proj ects. I also want to thank all the NEH
ju nior fellows and the staff at the center, and particularly the archivists, llya
Slavutskiy, Michelle McCarthy- Behler, and Tyi- Kimya Marx, whose patience
was invaluable in introducing me to archival work.
During the initial stages of this proj ect I was the Jay and Jeanie Schotten-
stein Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Religious Studies
and the Borns Jewish Studies Program. My colleagues there provided a vibrant
and rigorous intellectual community without which all of us could not do our
work. Thanks are due in par tic u lar to Judah Cohen, Constance Furey, Cooper
Harris, Sarah Imhoff, Kevin Jaques, Dov Baer Kehrler, Jason Mokhtarian,
Mark Roseman, Lisa Sideris, Winnifred Sullivan, and Jeffrey Veidlinger. The
year I left Indiana, J. Kameron Car ter arrived. Although we never crossed paths
in Bloomington, he has been a tremendous aid, in his writings and in conversa-
tion, in helping me understand the complex debates of critical race theory that
proved to be indispensable in the chapter on race. In the midst of my work on
this book I was fortunate to receive a faculty appointment at Dartmouth Col-
lege, in large part thanks to the perseverance of Susannah Heschel who has
been an exemplary colleague, friend, coauthor, and coconspirator. Her incisive
questions and criticisms have made this book sharper and more focused, and
her directorship of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth has cultivated
an atmosphere of learning and scholarship. I also want to thank the faculty and
fellows at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North Amer i ca, especially Yehuda
Kurtzer and Elana Stein Hain, where I have the privilege to serve as a Kogod
Se nior Research Fellow.
Special thanks are also due to Emily Burack, whom I met at the Center for
Jewish History. Emily was working at the center having just graduated from
Dartmouth, where she wrote an excellent se nior thesis on Kahane’s Jewish De-
fense League. She worked with me as a research assistant that year and also
shared with me some of her archival findings, which turned out to be very use-
ful. Along t hose lines, Menachem Butler continues to be an invaluable col-
league, who also has an interest in Kahane and postwar American Orthodoxy.
He was a generous interlocutor through the final years of working on the book
and shared with me some of his ongoing research on Kahane and American
Orthodoxy.