An internet influencer apparently posted something positive about Rav Meir Kahane, may his memory be for a blessing. A tumult has followed.
Rav Kahane cannot be discussed reasonably or dispassionately. People’s minds are too deeply pre-set about him. Say something positive and quite reasonably, and 80 percent of Jews will brand you a racist, bigot, homophobe, fascist, Nazi, and all other “Deplorables.” Say something a bit critical, and the Judgmentalist Wing of his followers will identify you as a self-hating Jew and sell-out.
TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and the other BDS (Bibi Derangement Syndrome) are nothing compared to Kahane Derangement Syndrome (KDS). It is nigh impossible to have a respectful discussion about the man or his ideas. Everyone — on both sides — emerges as deranged when the subject arises.
I may as well offer a few words here, while I am home on derange, because, other than his dear saintly wife, Rebbetzin Libby; his tzaddik of a brother, Rav Nachman, author of the Mei Menuchot who spells his name Kahana; and his parole officers, I probably know as much as anyone else.
Many of his followers include some of the best people I ever have known, but others in the Judgmentalist Wing are best to avoid. As early as 45 years ago, people were publishing articles about me as the world’s worst “sell out” because I had left JDL, either (i) to finish my college studies (1974-75), or (ii) to become an ordained rav (early 1980s) or (iii) to become the executive director of the American Likud (mid-1980s) or (iv) to return from Aliyah after my kablan (contractor) went bankrupt with my life savings (late 1980s), laying the seeds for my first marriage’s dissolution or (v) to become an attorney.
Back then, it hurt to be insulted publicly and called a “sell out.” By now, forty years later, after changes upon changes, I have remained more or less the same and no longer care, while those who called me a “sell-out” back then disappeared long ago. Some emerge in readers’ comments sections decades later to judge the medically based limitations that constrain a lung transplant survivor in the COVID era.
My first encounter with the Kahane Idea came in the early 1970’s when I was the elected student body president at Yeshiva University High School in Brooklyn (BTA), the same school he and Alan Dershowitz had attended. As student body president, I was simply trying to maintain my popularity by organizing an exciting program for my schoolmates: a speech on campus by the notorious Rav Meir Kahane. I was not particularly pro or con, but it would make me look good if I could get him to our school.
The high school principal really liked me, and although he always had refused it when asked by prior student presidents, he had a soft spot for me. He agreed we could have him at the school as long as I set it up as a debate with an acceptably serious debating opponent. He gave me a list of Acceptables, and I set about to get one. I called the ADL, American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, Federation, Orthodox Union, Rabbinical Council of America, and others. Each and every refused to debate him. So we could not have the program. As a result, he instead defiantly came to the school and stood on a car parked right outside. When I spread the word, the entire student body cleared out of the building to listen to him. That was so cool.
It was that experience that got me interested in knowing more about this guy. No one wants to debate him? That’s crazy. If he is so wrong about everything, just debate him and make him look bad. What are they afraid of? Is he undebatable because he is right? So I tried to learn more about him.
Luckily, it was 1970, and I was in the epicenter of Jewish student activism, BTA. Half the kids wore JDL buttons. Twenty or so came every day with nunchuks . Some wore army uniforms with JDL arm patches sewed in. And there was my classmate, Yossi Klein, a big JDLer, the single most inspiring kid I ever had met. In time, he actually would lead seven or so kids to fly to Russia, where they held a sit-in in Moscow, demanding that the Soviets let Jews leave. That took guts. It was crazy. The Commie Russkies might have killed him. Instead, the Russians arrested the seven and kicked them out of the Soviet Union.
So I got inspired. I started wearing a JDL button like half the school did. Me, the big hero.
It has been my nature of 55 years not to do anything half-baked. I also often read, which many JDLers in the Judgmentalist Wing did not do too often. So I started immersing myself in understanding his ideology. And then came the humongous turning point: the February 1971 international Brussels conference for Soviet Jewry. All Jewish leaders from all Jewish organizations all over the world gathered in Belgium for a massive public consciousness-raising moment for Soviet Jewry. All . . . except for one: everyone had agreed to bar Rav Meir Kahane from attending.
By now, I had become quite informed about the Soviet Jewry movement and Rav Kahane’s role. From the Soviet Revolution of 1917 until 1967 or so, there had never been a single street protest for Soviet Jewry. Two things changed that. Yaakov Birnbaum and Glenn Richter had started an activist group, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), which held public protests. And the Jewish Defense League, which expanded its agenda from fighting local anti-Jewish street crime and all-purpose antisemites to advocating for Soviet Jewry with a tweak. SSSJ did it with rallies, and JDL was allegedly involved with some midnight bombings of Soviet offices throughout Manhattan (the Aeroflot airline, Tass news agency, Pravda and Izvestia news bureaus, and Amtorg the trade agency) and some shootings into Soviet buildings like their Washinton embassy and New York consulate.
Regardless of condemnations of JDL-related alleged violence, it was JDL and Rav Kahane who had put the heretofore unknown Soviet Jewry issue on the front pages of the world media. It was impossible to get news coverage for your cause in those days, especially if the leftist media did not care, because it was a time before alternative internet and cable TV news outlets. All Rav Kahane wanted was to attend and make a short speech. Instead, the Jewish leaders arranged with the Belgium government to arrest him and expel him from the country if he showed up. He showed up, and they expelled him. It was international news: the grand leaders of the Jews had worked with the police of Brussels to have this rabbi thrown out of the country rather than make a short speech.
Inside the conference hall, there was quite a tumult of recriminations. The Hadassah president, wearing a big floral hat, stood up to condemn Rav Kahane. Then Menachem Begin, representing the worldwide Jabotinsky movement six years before he was elected Israel’s prime minister and became wider known, got up to say they should let him speak. The Hadassah matron told Begin to sit down and shut up. Begin, who had commanded the Irgun, responded: “Madame, you have a big hat on your head. I had a price on mine.”
As I read about all this, I decided the time had come to devote the rest of my life to Jewish activism and leadership. I was a college freshman at Columbia and changed my focus from pre-law to becoming a rabbi. I had first become interested in JDL when discovering that no one would debate him and that Jewish leaders could be so “Jewish Leader-like” as to have him arrested by Jew-haters in Belgium rather than let him speak a few minutes. Yossi had psyched on and guilted me into activism. This was 1970s Brooklyn, the John Lindsay years, when Jews were getting beaten-up-on in the streets. It was the beginning era of burgeoning inner-city antisemitism. And the plight of Soviet Jewry cried out to me in my kishkes.
The JDL I joined was not at all involved in Israel except to advocate “Not One Inch.” The subject of Arabs was not on JDL’s horizon. It simply was not an issue. The focus was on JDL’s five principles: (i) Ahavat Yisrael (in the sense of Love of Jews); (ii) Hadar (taking pride in being Jewish); (iii) Barzel (Iron) (understanding that Jews need to train and know how to fight, and that violence sometimes, if employed wisely, can be a good thing); (iv) Mishma’at (discipline); and (v) Bitachon (faith in the eternal indestructability of the Jewish people).
That idea did not only grab Yossi Klen and me. It grabbed some of the generation’s most famous and successful Jewish personalities: prominent rabbis, politicians, academics, medical doctors, attorneys, professors, and celebrities. I will not mention the specific rabbis because other Jews’ KDS would hurt their careers and legacies, but I know the names, and many were prominent Orthodox rabbis of the generation. Same with the politicians. By now, it is public knowledge that long-time superstar New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind started as a JDL leader. Also his great wife, Shani. The celebrities included Chuck Barris (the “Gong Show”), Joan Rivers, Bob Dylan, and others of that caliber.
I was part of that from 1970 through 1976. I left in 1976 for several reasons, primarily as I shifted my entire life plan from becoming a normal successful kid with the talent, skills, and connections to become a rich and successful lawyer, and instead became a grossly underpaid rabbi who would face a Yeshiva University employment blacklist that denied me a career opportunity to become rav of a serious shul. Or — in the words of JDL’s Judgmentalist wing — to become a “sell out.”
As the years unfolded, I saw one after another prominent JDLer back away from prior JDL involvements and identifications. Almost always, it was for the same basic reason.
- Yes, Rav Kahane was right about needing to learn to physically fight off street antisemites and beat up anyone who acted like today’s rioters at Columbia-Barnard or muggers. That’s why the street and campus antisemitism all over the place nowadays was suppressed in the 1970’s — not because the police and university presidents did their jobs and arrested them, but because we beat them up.
- He also was right that the new-fangled “Affirmative Action” would particularly bite hard at Jews.
- He was right that Jews needed to back off from a one-sided devotion to knee-jerk Western liberalism.
- He was right that petitions and bland street rallies never would get Jews out of the Soviet Union.
- He was right that Jews had to become tough.
- He was right that Israel needed to annex Judea and Samaria, declaring sovereignty at least from the River to the Sea.
- He was right that the relationship with local Arabs inside Israel had to change because no country on earth should put up with a perpetual demographic dedicated to blowing up buses, pizza stores, malls, and murdering Jews forever.
- He was right that no self-respecting Arab’s heart can swell with pride as the country’s national anthem speaks of “our dream of 2,000 years to dominate the land as a free nation in our land of Zion.”
- He was right that it is racist and disrespectful to Arabs to believe they would sell their national rights and aspirations for indoor toilets and plumbing.
However, despite his being so right a visionary ahead of his time, he also was curiously determined to follow a pointlessly counter-productive path that sabotaged much of his visionary program. It was not necessary to call Arabs “dogs” in public. No one has ever shown me how that advanced the cause. Or to force forward for an early reckoning the inevitable conflict between Torah Judaism and Western democracy — why that conflict could not be delayed meanwhile, keeping the eyes on the prize.
It never was necessary to demand that every single Arab in Israel be expelled when the country still had not yet implemented a Phase One: to promptly execute the killers and immediately expel their extended families. It was factually incorrect to argue that America 1972 was like Berlin 1932, just six years away from Holocaust. And it was wrong to try legislating that Arabs be banned from beaches, an unhelpful, unnecessary, and useless point of conflict that practically begged opponents to equate such a vision with Mein Kampf Nazism.
Therefore, so many really excellent and passionately supportive allies had to step aside because they just could not be associated — professionally, nor by virtue of their own consciences — with the unnecessary excesses that seemed to generate conflict just for conflict’s sake. A darned shame.
But that internet influencer was right to bring Rav Kahane back into the discussion. Every day for the past 50 years, some Jew in Israel gets blown up or stabbed or car-rammed by an Arab with no prior criminal record emerging from the atmosphere to mass-murder Jews. There must be a reckoning. If not expelling all Arabs from Israel as Phase One, at least executing all convicted murderers within 24 hours of the final appellate ruling, expelling all convicted other criminals and their extended families (uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, grandparents, and those closer), barring entry to Arabs from outside Israel who have married anyone inside Israel, and criminalizing carrying a knife of any sort outside one’s home.
Alongside all that, releasing into freedom all Jews who have killed Arabs in conjunction with the country releasing Arabs who have murdered Jews. If we are supposed to digest the release of Aryeh Fuld’s murderer, and all the others, why care a whit about how others feel about Amiran Ben-Uliel going free?
Rav Kahane was one of the most consequential thinkers of our time. He was a profoundly learned Torah scholar. I was witness to the exceptional decency of his character. He was very, very clever and funny. And if Arabs had left Jews alone in Israel, communists in Russia, Nazis in Germany, antisemites of color on Brooklyn’s streets, white Jew-haters elsewhere, and Marxists in the Knesset and Histadrut, he would have left them alone reciprocally.
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