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

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

Shaul Magid. Princeton Univ, $35 (296p) ISBN 978-0-691179-33-9

Dartmouth Jewish Studies professor Magid (Hasidism Incarnate) examines in this enlightening and accessible study how Jewish Defense League (JDL) founder Meir Kahane (1932–1990) “used the tactics of the far left in the service of a right-wing critique of American Jewry.” Magid places Kahane, who believed that “preemptive violence” was necessary to prevent another Holocaust, and the JDL, whose members instigated riots and bombed Soviet cultural institutions in the U.S. to protest the Kremlin’s persecution of Jewish dissidents, within the context of the Weather Underground and other radical political groups of the era. After receiving a suspended prison sentence for illegal activities related to the JDL, Kahane emigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded a right-wing political party whose platform called for the expulsion of all Arabs from the country. Though Magid describes Kahane as “a destructive force against human decency,” he takes the tenets of Kahanism seriously, including the insight that the demands of preserving a Jewish state run counter to the ideals of Western democracy, and persuasively argues that Kahane was a major influence on the American Jewish establishment’s “conservative turn” in recent decades. The result is a nuanced and eye-opening portrait of an overlooked figure in Jewish political history. (Oct.)