Shaul Magid on the Jewish Radicalism of Meir Kahane

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.

Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2024) on Jewish Defense League Founder and the surprising American origins of Jewish radicalism not of the left but of the right.

The conversation starts with Magid recounting a call from celebrated leftist radical Arthur Waskow to make the case that all American Jewish radicalism is of the left. Magid sees it differently: Although the radically right Meir Kahane went on to fame and influence in Israel, both through his party Kach (meaning Thus!) and through successor parties that heightened ultra-nationalism, he loved baseball, and grew up thinking about how to strengthen Jewish identity within a late 1960's America defined by "race wars and culture wars of 1967/68. " Long before his semi-successsful transplantation to Israel, he was the founder of the Jewish Defense League, which absorbed black nationalism (he even wrote a piece called "The Jewish Panthers") and tried to flip it into a model for mobilized Jewish ethnic sectarianism.

John asks Shaul about Kahane's claim not to hate Arabs but to love Jews--Shaul believes he actually hated both. Kahane's misunderstanding of the Israeli Black Panthers (a group of Jewish radicals from Middle Eastern and North African origins, inspired by the American Black Panther revolutionary movement) is symptomatic of his failure to grasp the complexity of political currents in Israel. Golda Meir was able to adapt to Israeli political currents when she emigrated from America; Kahane not so much.

Nonetheless, by the late 1970's a home-grown neo-Kahanism waxes in Israel, with a majoritarian arrogance unlike Kahane's perennially minoritarian view. He may not have fully broken through to the mainstream, but when he was assassinated in 1990 his funeral (at the time when his party Kach was still banned, when a solution to Jewish-Arab coexistence still seemed within reach) was still the largest any Israeli had ever had.

Does liberalism, and liberal Zionism in the 1990s succeed? Magid says it had its moment in the 1990s--it tepidly opposed settlers, endorsed Oslo. But the reality of the 2020's has no space for that liberal two-statism. What we have now, which is distinct from Kahane's older (right) radicalism is outright Jewish conservatism, driven by the potent impact of Orthodoxy.

About October 7, Kahane would have said "I told you so." Kahane’s recurrent refrain was that, no matter what naïve liberals might hope, Palestinian nationalism would not be bartered away for the goods of electricity or a washing machine. And yet Magid sees this current moment as an unexpected boon in some ways for the Jewish radical left. The journal Jewish Currents and Jewish Voices for Peace have found a new argument for turning away from liberal Zionism to a new form of unapologetic diasporism.

Meir Kahane's influential books include:

• Time to Go Home (Nash, 1972)
• Our Challenge: The Chosen Land, 1974
• Never Again: "one of the most surprising things about the Holocaust is that Jews were surprised by it."
• The Story of the Jewish Defense League (1975), which has a chapter called "The Jewish Panthers"
• Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews, 1986

Mentioned in the episode:

• Yossi Klein-Halevy in his 1995 Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist said of Kahane that he "loved Jews and hated Jews at the same time"
• Neo-Kahanists: Bentzi Gopstein and Baruch Marzel and later Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is not a Kahanist because he's not a revolutionary, a minoritarian dissident from liberalism, which no longer actually prevails in Israel; instead he is an "incremntalist" inside a securely ethnonationalist Israeli polity.
• Right-wing politicans like Menachem Begin and the Mizrachi politician Geulah Cohen (eventually part of the 1967 Movement for Greater Israel) were skeptical of Kahane, Magid points out. (also of interest, his accusation of racism against Labor movement politicians like Abba Eban and Yossi Sarid).
• The notorious Alan Dershowitz-Meir Kahane debate (Boston, 1985): Kahane makes the case that it's non-religious Jews who are racist, since they claim superiority without any theological underpinnings. kahane actually coexisted with a left radical tradition of eg The Jewish Liberation Journal, edited by Aviva Kantor
• MG Rosenberg, "To Uncle Tom and Other Such Jews" (1970).
• J J Goldberg, Is Zionism compatible with Radicalism (reprinted in Jewish Radicalism : a selected anthology Porter, Jack Nusan, editor.; Dreier, Peter, 1948- editor.)
• Ze'ev Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall was enormously influential on Kahane--who was proud of never being surprised by Arab violence and anti-Semitism. Liberals he said were perennial and naively shocked.

Recallable Books

• Hanah Arendt's Jewish Writings are always on Shaul’s table. “I'm thinking with her all the time.”
• Jean Genet Prisoner of Love (posthumously published in 1968) --the radical impulse to romanticize the PLO and the Black Panthers.
• Philip Roth, The Counterlife. (1986)
• Hans Falada, Every Man Dies Alone (1947)

Listen to and Read the episode here.