“Is Kahane Becoming Normalized?”: Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane’s Zionist Radicalism

This conversation, like the earlier Violent Majorities series on the podcast Recall This Book, explores ethnonationalism at work in the West and abroad. Telling that story entails charting how extremist politics overseas—in Israel, for example—is indebted to earlier American thinking that arose during and in some ways out of ’60s radicalism. Making that connection, by way of Brooklyn no less, is Shaul Magid, professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence at Harvard Divinity School and Rabbi emeritus of the Fire Island Synagogue. His many books include Hasidism on the Margin (2005); American Post-Judaism (2013); and Piety and Rebellion (2019); as well as a stunning recent collection of essays, The Necessity of Exile (2023).

In his remarkable 2021 Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Shaul shows a triple legacy of Kahane still present within American Judaism: 1) assertive expression of Jewish identity bolstered by multiculturalism; 2) a deep distrust of liberalism bolstered by neoconservatism; and 3) a belief in the omnipresence of antisemitism. He discusses it here with Public Books editor John Plotz and with Eugene Sheppard of Brandeis University, associate professor of modern Jewish history and thought, director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (2007). A longer version of this interview aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books.

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Eugene Sheppard (ES): John and I are faculty at Brandeis, and I want to note that Shaul also is connected to Brandeis. He received his doctorate in our Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies in 1994 and really is just an excellent exemplar of the type of training that occurred when he was studying in that program, where you could see it reflected in his astonishing breadth of interests across especially Jewish texts that go from antiquity to contemporary elements. And then he’s taken that spirit and has constantly engaged elements outside of Jewish studies, whether it be in general aspects of religious studies, in particular Christianity of late, but also Black studies, feminism, queer studies, post-colonial studies. He kind of goes everywhere.

Shaul, your work demonstrates a sensitivity to the counterculture as well as an understanding that counterculture doesn’t necessarily mean progressive heroes on the left. Counterculture can easily be more unsettling figures to many liberal academics, on the right—such as Meir Kahane, who is someone people long preferred to ignore because he’s just too unsettling, too disturbing. He messes up so many narratives that we have about what Judaism is, what American Jews are, what Zionism is. You put a light on this seemingly exceptional figure to look at some of the more startling contradictions.

Shaul Magid (SM): I remember getting an email from Arthur Waskow, who is a very well-known member of the Jewish left and, in a certain sense, a towering figure of the Jewish counterculture. And he said to me, “I don’t really agree with the title of your book because only people on the left are radicals.” And I said, “Well, that’s kind of the point of the book: that we know that not to be the case.”

Kahane understood a couple of things about the American Jewish psyche, and one of them was the continuing trauma of the Holocaust and the way in which that had come into more mainstream American Jewish consciousness through the Eichmann trial.

He’s born in America, in Brooklyn, in the 1930s. His family were not Holocaust survivors. In fact, he has no close family that we know of that were victims of the Holocaust. And yet he grows up in a world full of Holocaust survivors. When he went to school, he was living in a classroom where nobody had grandparents … or a medical history. That’s number one.

Number two is that his father was a congregational rabbi. Charles Kahane was a very conventional, Modern Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn. And the basic radicalization of Kahane as a thinker really comes from a family history of relatives from his father’s family who were killed in the 1929 riots in Safed in northern Israel. That was a very big part of the Kahane family lore and Kahane’s father became a friend of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the revision Zionist movement, who would stay in the Kahane home when he came to America to raise money. Kahane has childhood memories of Jabotinsky, who becomes a kind of heroic figure for him. (Jabotinsky’s secretary in Brooklyn at that time was Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who was Bibi Netanyahu’s father.)

Kahane was quintessentially American. He was a lifelong baseball fan. In fact, he used to write a sports column for a popular Brooklyn daily. There was something quintessentially American about him. He believed in the American dream. He believed in Judaism in America. He founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, and in its initial statement says that the organization seeks to save the dream for diaspora Jews. That was really what he was interested in. His first book, in 1971, Never Again!, has only one chapter on Zionism in Israel. It’s not really the centerpiece of his ideology. He’s a Zionist for sure. But the idea of Israel as the only place for the Jews was something that was not part of his upbringing or his early career.

He spends his early career in the 1960s kind of as a middling Orthodox rabbi in a variety of synagogues in Queens and Brooklyn, and as a sportswriter for a newspaper. He becomes radicalized with the race wars and culture wars of the late 1960s. In May 1968, after the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school strike that brought the New York City school system to a halt, he founded the Jewish Defense League as an organization to protect the elderly Jews who were left in neighborhoods in Brooklyn that were called then Frontier Neighborhoods.

John Plotz (JP): You have an interesting formulation for that moment. You say he absorbed identity politics and made it central to his program to instill pride in Jews through power and, if necessary, violence. Are you describing then a reactive formation or an imitation? In other words, is this following the pattern laid down by the turn from civil rights to Black power, let’s say? Or are you seeing it more as a rising in reaction to Black power?

SM: It’s a reaction to two things. There is an organization that was founded in 1964 in Chabad, in Crown Heights, called the Maccabees. And the Maccabees were very similar to the Jewish Defense League in that they had civil patrols around Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, protecting their community. Kahane could have very well gotten the idea of the Jewish Defense League from the Maccabees; and he’s also absorbing Black nationalism. That’s very, very, very important to him. The Story of the Jewish Defense League has a chapter on the Jewish Panthers. He saw the Black Panthers as a model of ethnic pride and the protection of ethnic communities that he then tried to flip into Jewish circles.

But it wasn’t with any kind of cooperation with the Black Panthers—he thought the Black Panthers were antisemites—but he used the Black Panthers as a model.

JP: At the end of the book, you quote Kahane as saying, “I don’t hate Arabs, I love Jews.” But you say that, in a macabre way, he hated both.

SM: I stole half of that line from Yossi Klein Halevi’s book Memoir of a Jewish Extremist, where he says something very similar about Kahane. Something like there has never been somebody who loved Jews and hated Jews at the same time. And that’s true because—and this really translates into the Israeli reality—for Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism. And liberalism is that which will destroy and undermine the possibility of Jewish survival. He was getting at basically saying American Jewry was corrupt because it had absorbed liberalism, and Israeli Jewry was corrupt because it was liberal. Liberalism in Israel is simply reproducing Diasporism in the land.

JP: Just to complete the biography: the reason we’re talking about him is not just that he founded the JDL in America, but then for reasons that you can unfold to us, he has to leave America. He goes to Israel, and he attempts to get a foothold with the same kind of radical right thinking there, but he’s initially unsuccessful.

SM: He leaves America in September 1971. Weeks before he had received a suspended sentence for arm smuggling across state lines. And the likelihood is that Kahane realized that he was going to be indicted by the FBI. And so, he essentially escapes to Israel. And then he writes a book called Time to Go Home, which is a kind of swan song to America, saying that America has been the greatest country in all human history to the Jews and even there, antisemitism will be on the rise and cannot be prevented. America, for him, was a failed project for the Jews, a notion that has gained popularity in the present.

What I think we’re experiencing in America and even more so in Israel nowadays is kind of a domestication of Kahane. In the sense that that is where it’s become normalized. Kahane really was a radical. He really owned being a radical. And now people who no longer consider themselves radical but rather conventional, reasonable, realistic, are espousing very similar things, both in Israel and in America.

So, he moves to Israel, and part of the failure—this is part of Kahane’s failure writ large—is that he’s never able to understand the categories of race and religion in Israel that he learned in America. In Israel, there’s this term, klita, meaning to become absorbed into Israeli society. And he never really had social klita. He translated the culture and race wars of ’60s America into Israel, and the Arabs just became “the Blacks.” And I think that’s part of the reason why the Israeli political establishment never really accepted him, and never really understood him. The situation in Israel is more complex. You have the Arab population, you have the Mizrahi, the Jews from Arab countries, you have the Ashkenazi. It just never really worked in the same way.

And one of the great examples of this is the rise of the Israeli Black Panther movement in 1971. About them Kahane thought, “Oh, these people could be part of my base because they hate the white Ashkenazi liberal political establishment,” when in fact, many of them saw themselves in solidarity with Arabs. In Israel things are not, shall we say, simply “black and white.”

If you want to think about Kahane, think about Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers. Think about Malcolm X. Kahane wanted to overthrow the country and reestablish a new regime.

JP: Then there is what you call “homegrown … neo-Kahanism,” which doesn’t take that long to take hold, right?

SM: Late ’70s or early ’80s, that starts to happen. And this is a group of people who are born in Israel, living in settlements, and they have a very different understanding of Israeli society, Israeli culture. They have always have been the dominating majority. They have always been in power, and yet Kahane is still acting with the American mentality, as if he’s a minority. And so you start to have homegrown Kahanists like Bentzi Gopstein and Baruch Marzel who see themselves very much in line with Kahane except they understand the complexity of Israel very well.

Then there are people like Ben-Gvir—I think he’s a neo-Kahanist in a way. I don’t think he’s really a Kahanist because Kahane was a revolutionary. If you want to think about Kahane, think about Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers. Think about Malcolm X. Kahane wanted to overthrow the country and reestablish a new regime. Ben-Gvir is not a revolutionary. He’s an incrementalist. He may have similar ideas in terms of what he would like to see happen, but the reason why Ben-Gvir is not rejected by the Israeli political establishment the way Kahane was, recently Naftali Bennett said he would work with him, is because even people like Menachem Begin and Geula Cohen and people on the Israeli right started to see that Kahane really was a revolutionary, that he really wanted to overthrow the government. At that point, they abandoned him. That is not happening to Ben-Gvir, he has not yet been abandoned by the right.

JP: You make the Kahane versus “Neo-Kahane” distinction. Can we unpack that a bit more? Is Kahane a vector who brought a kind of thinking that eventually affected this change in Israel? Or is he just a guy who came early and his ideas didn’t really take root?

SM: Kahane’s ideas didn’t really take root in his time, but he planted seeds, and those seeds sprouted a couple of decades later. Now, the interesting thing about Kahane is that because he was assassinated, he just disappears. At one moment. He’s just gone. And interestingly, his funeral was the largest funeral in Israel up to that time. A lot of Israelis and American Jews felt like, “Oh, thank God this person is gone.” The funeral of a person who was removed from the Knesset because of a racism law had the largest funeral of any individual in the history of the country. Just think about what that actually means in terms of planting seeds.

It wasn’t exactly the right time. There was still a very strong Labor contingent in the government. There was still a very strong kibbutz movement. There was still a very strong socialist ethos. There was still a very strong belief that somehow the problem with the Palestinians could be solved. It wasn’t clear, but somehow it could be solved. And I think that once you have the collapse of Oslo in the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000, even maybe the first Intifada in 1987, people started to say, “Well, this is actually not happening”—Kahane was waiting in the wings.

ES: The claims to Jewish supremacy are much more naked now. You make it clear in the book that he did not see himself as a racist. He accused secular Zionists of being racist. You didn’t use the term Jewish supremacy in the book, but it does seem to capture the sense that, okay, this is our land, and if Arabs can accept Jewish supremacy and live under those terms, that’s fine, otherwise they’ve got to get out.

SM: The racist claim was Kahane’s way of trying to undermine secular Zionism. His 1987 book, Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews, is his response to the racism law and to being ousted by the Knesset. He basically says to Abba Eban or Yossi Sarid, You are a racist because you don’t believe God gave the land to the Jews, and therefore what right do you have to be here? There’s another example of a debate that he had with Alan Dershowitz. Kahane asks if Dershowitz wanted his children to marry Jews. He says yes. Kahane asked if it was because of Halakha. And Dershowitz says no. And then Kahane says, and I’m paraphrasing, “Professor Dershowitz, you’re a racist to exclude non-Jews unless you are obligated to by religious law.”¹ It’s the same way he’s able to use those categories to say that I’m not a racist because I believe that God gave me the land. This is one of the reasons why, as a leftist, I think Kahane is important. It is because he really does have an intuitive way of pointing to the hypocrisy inherent in the liberal project. And in that sense, he was a radical.

JP: Can you talk more about that notion you have of the different configurations of American Jewish radicalism? At one point in the book you say that he used the tactics of the far left for the purpose of the reactionary. But what you just said now is a little bit more than that. It’s not just that it’s a stylistic or tactical deployment of things that the left radicals had been doing. It’s actually substantively similar to left radicalism.

SM: In the 1960s you had New Left radicalized Jews who were also radically leftist Zionists. I don’t think you can have a radically leftist Zionist anymore. I don’t think that Zionism today provides any space for that, for example, a bi-nationalist who doesn’t believe in a “Jewish” state. But you still did have the possibility of that at the time. And Kahane was very much a part of that radical period. It’s very interesting. Where did these left radicals and the JDL meet? Soviet Jewry was the meeting place where you had people from the JDL and Havurat Shalom at the same protests. You had people who were members of the JDL and members of radical left-wing Jewish organizations like the Brooklyn Bridge Collective. So, it is more than tactics. There’s a way in which the radical leftists and Kahane as a reactionary radical rightist were both attacking what they understood to be vanilla, weak, thin Jewish identity that could not really last within a late ’60s, early ’70s American context.

JP: You have a wonderful account of the rise of neo-conservatism as sort of happening in Manhattan just a few miles away, but without communication. But the effect of both rises is that liberal consensus gets hollowed out.

SM: So you have what were called the New York Intellectuals, a moderately conservative group of Upper West Side Jews, many involved with Commentary Magazine—and Kahane mentions submitting a handful of essays to Commentary, none of which were ever accepted. But he mentions reading the magazine. Norman Podhoretz, the editor at the time, didn’t have much interest in him. And one of the reasons they didn’t have any interest in him was not only because he was a militant radical but because of religion, because the New York Intellectuals were really secular, even though some like Lucy Dawidowicz were moderately traditional, and Kahane and his audience were Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn. That was his base. And I think that it’s the anti-secularism of Kahane that really didn’t allow those people to meet, which as I say in the book, they were only a subway ride away.

But here’s my question. Is it true that liberalism doesn’t succeed? I think it kind of does. The 1980s is the moment of liberal Zionism. That’s when you have, on the one hand, a settler movement that liberal Zionists can temperately oppose, and the real optimistic possibility of a two-state solution. Then you have Oslo in 1993. That’s the comfort zone of liberal Zionism in the early 1990s. The problem is that the liberal Zionism of the 1980s and ’90s doesn’t speak to the reality of the 2020s. It’s not being transferred to another generation. What’s happening now in the 2020s is just outright Jewish conservatism. There’s no “neo” anymore. And that’s being driven by the incredibly potent influence of orthodoxy on the American Jewish establishment in ways that did not exist before. If you look at some of the major figures of the American Jewish institutional world, they’re either Orthodox, Orthodox adjacent, or espousing Orthodox values.

JP: But there’s another claim you make, and I wonder how it’s related, which is the way that Jewish identity politics comes about because of the multiculturalism of a postliberal conception of American society. I hear what you’re saying about the enduring efficacy of the liberal Zionist consensus. But then multiculturalism itself basically provides at least an occasion or a breeding ground for this kind of Jewish identity politics.

SM: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think multiculturalism saved Orthodoxy. Multiculturalism is the reason Chabad is so successful.

ES: Because of the anxieties that it produces.

SM: And I think part of the real genius of the Lubavitcher Rebbe is that in the 1960s, he saw multiculturalism coming decades before it arrived. He knew something was going to change in the American landscape. He knew questions of diversity were going to become prominent. And so, he sets up a whole infrastructure and once it hits in the 1980s, boom, he’s ahead of everybody. I think the Lubavitcher Rebbe may have understood America more than any Jewish leader in the 20th century.

Multiculturalism is something that Kahane never really experienced. Before he left America in 1971 he was still living in a very different kind of American cultural reality. Even though we’re arguably beyond multiculturalism today, into what David Hollinger calls post-ethnicity, it still resonates, and it’s still translating down into a particular kind of Jewish ethnic pride identity. I’ve gotten a few questions from people asking me what I think Kahane would’ve thought of October 7. And I think that Kahane would’ve just said, “I told you so.” He would not have been shocked.

Kahane began with the premise that he understands the Arabs better than the leftists do (he called them Arabs) and that the Palestinians are no less nationalist than Jews are, and they’re not going to sell their national aspirations for “electricity or a washing machine.” That was the line that he used very often. So, he basically always saw it as a zero-sum game. It was us against them. And I think that post–October 7, increasingly, Israelis are thinking the same thing. Again, Kahane would say of the campus protests, “Yes, of course, these people are pro-Palestinian because they’re antisemitic.” And you see that the way in which so many people who are liberals or define themselves as liberals are making those same kinds of comments, flattening out the protest movement as if it’s all antisemitism. [They say,] “There’s no justification for fighting against the war where 18,000 children were killed. No, it’s just all antisemitism.” This is a deeply embedded American assumption of what Hannah Arendt critically called “eternal antisemitism”—that gentiles are antisemitic. And that was Kahane’s basic assumption, that of course they’re going to be antisemitic. Why would you be surprised? It is amazing how much that resonates today with people who would never identify with Kahane.

JP: And are you surprised by how polarized this has become, how rapidly it’s turned into this question of whether protest against Israel is antisemitic or not?

SM: I’m not shocked for the following reason, because it was before October 7 that Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL said that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Once you accept that as a normative claim, then everything follows from that. It’s a completely egregious, unsubstantiated, and irresponsible claim to make. Not only is there no nuance, but there’s no way to negotiate the difference between a national state project and a people. There’s always been a very complicated relationship between antisemitism and Zionism. And then you have the 2018 Nation-State Law that says that Israel is the “state of the Jewish people.” Only the Jewish people. You’re basically speaking the same language. So, each side is playing off the other in a very tragic way.

JP: Is this (October 7) a death-knell for diaspora thinking, or is it just a round to the Zionist side?

SM: Here’s the thing that I find so interesting about our moment. The Jewish group or the Jewish sector that has benefited the most from this war is the radical left, Jewish Voice for Peace; their organization has grown exponentially. Many students of mine call themselves “anti-Zionist” when they never would’ve done that before the destruction of Gaza. The Jewish left has found a new diasporic cause; the Jewish right is just basically arguing that it’s antisemitism all the way down. The middle has collapsed. A lot of things are changing in unpredictable ways. There’s the potential for the birth of another kind of Jewish diaspora because a lot of people who are on the edges of liberal Zionism just got pushed over the edge, either to the right, or to the left.

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JP: We like to end by naming an older book that people who got something out of this conversation might enjoy.

SM: For me, Hannah Arendt’s The Jewish Writings is always on my table. I don’t always agree with her, but she is an incredibly generative thinker, and I’m thinking with her all the time. Leo Strauss is another person who I don’t agree with, but he’s so thought provoking and his arguments are so persuasive that he’s also always very close by. He always challenges me. And then there is Nahman of Bratslav’s Likkutei Moharan, that I simply could not live without.

ES: I’ll mention something that’s completely out of left field here, given our discussion. And that’s a novel by Hans Fallada called Every Man Dies Alone. And it’s a story, a novel about a couple in Nazi Germany after the French capitulation that decide to engage in a radical protest movement by dropping dissident postcards in various buildings in Berlin, and then a police investigation about it.

I bring this up because it deals fundamentally with problems of complicity: No matter what you do, there are going to be consequences that are unintended. And even if you do nothing, it will have catastrophic and fatal consequences. In this moment, it’s easy to completely dismiss someone like Kahane as being unhinged, radical, irresponsible. Shaul refrains from using the term fanatic to describe him, because I think that’s used to dismiss him. But there’s something about these figures that are driven to action that we have to take seriously, because doing nothing comes with its own peril.