In his January 17 column entitled Kahane Chai!, Rav Yoel Schonfeld wrote that his feelings had changed regarding Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League in New York and the Kach party in Israel. Calling Kahane “the most prescient Jew of our times” and “a wise man,” he urged that “the Kahane message still should ring loudly in our ears.” In the next issue, Warren Hecht disagreed with Rabbi Schonfeld, arguing that to publicly advocate the positions of Kahane was to supply ammunition to our enemies with which to brand us as racists.
I, too, found Rabbi Schonfeld’s views disturbing, but did not want to write an opposing piece based on vague recollections, without having first read at least some of Kahane’s words in the original. So off to the library I went.
Just as a librarian was telling me that none of Kahane’s books were currently onsite, a woman approached us, offering to lend me her personal copy of They Must Go, the manifesto written by Kahane while in Ramle prison, in which he passionately argued for the transfer of Israeli Arabs out of the State of Israel. She added that she used to work for Kahane. I explained to her my purpose in seeking the volume, whereupon she rescinded her offer of the loan, and moved off, without telling me her name.
Imagine my surprise to discover that my brief encounter with JoAnn Kestin-Fishbane in the KGH Public Library had become the subject of her Letter to the Editor on the front page of the next edition of the Queens Jewish Link! Though she omitted the withdrawal of her offer and her having worked for Kahane, in other respects the account was accurate.
My first reaction to the letter was to feel flattered that JKF held me up as a paragon of integrity, praising my insistence on researching my subject and not just shooting from the hip. This was better than the last time I’d interacted with the QJL Letters and reaped only personal insults and condemnation from a respondent (and silence from the editors). But on second thought, I realized that Kestin-Fishbane only complimented me in order to hold me up as a foil to Warren Hecht, whom she proceeded to attack. This pleased me less – in fact, not at all.
I happen to agree with Hecht’s main point, that it was unwise for Rabbi Schonfeld to publicly write in favor of the policies first espoused by Rabbi Kahane because such support provides ammunition for enemies of Israel. One only has to look at how references to Amalek by Israeli officials have been exploited to see the justness of Hecht’s argument. Two MSNBC commentators, Ali Velshi and Mehdi Hasan, flexed their biblical muscles and pelted Israeli spokespersons with questions about Amalek and ethnic cleansing. Then the plaintiffs at the International Court of Justice at the Hague incorporated references to Amalek in their case against Israel. You can respond that we need not care about such purveyors of slander. Indeed, Kahane would likely have said that we should fear no one but G-d, but the fact is that these arguments then filter into the views of American legislators and the public, raising the level of opposition to President Biden’s support of Israel, and reducing the amount of time that he can politically afford to allow Israel to finish the job it must do. It’s fine to pound our chests and declare that we don’t care about public opinion, but when it translates into pressure to accept a premature ceasefire without the hostages returned, we are dealing with pikuach nefesh. More about Kahane’s theological response to such arguments later.
But that’s not all. It’s not merely unwise to call for the “voluntary transfer” of all Palestinians on a practical level; it is wrong on an ethical level. It is racist and a chilul Hashem, a desecration of G-d’s name. Notice how proponents use the word “transfer,” rather than “expulsion,” to sidestep any uncomfortable associations with 1492 or other dates when the exact same thing was done to us. (Expelled people expel people?) The fig leaf of the “voluntary” nature of the transfer is removed by Kahane himself, at the end of They Must Go, where he concedes that those Arabs who refuse to exit on their own will be forcibly exiled. “The transfer shall be effected peacefully, if possible, but if the Arab still refuses, then forcibly and without compensation” (p. 210).
It is understandable and tempting to look back at Kahane’s ideas with a degree of nostalgia at a time like this. Just as Kahane’s charisma and claims of Jewish superiority resonated with some Jews of a post-Holocaust generation, who were watching their neighborhoods change and who felt threatened by their African American neighbors, so too do his ideas gain popularity within Israeli and American Jewish publics shaken to the core by October 7, whose dream of coexistence has turned out to be an illusion. The dilemma is real: When no realistic peace partner exists, and yet a two-state solution is being vigorously pushed by even friendly governments, we feel beleaguered. When Israel is sacrificing the lives of her soldiers to protect non-combatants and is still condemned for perpetrating genocide, it is natural to feel that it is us against the world. In such vulnerable moments, it is easy to choose the simplistic and easy approach over the complex and less satisfying. It is easy to follow a demagogue and tell ourselves that he has the courage to say what others are thinking but are afraid to say. But we know better.
We know that just as Kahane had his ardent supporters in his lifetime, he had his fierce detractors. These included the Israeli government, which declared his party racist and barred it from running for Knesset. He himself noted that much of his support came from Jews who “had tasted the bitter dregs of Jewish minority status under Muslim rule” (p. viii). In other words, Jews from democratic societies were a tougher sell and the ones who needed convincing. So, he had to persuade them that democracy is foreign to Judaism and that discriminating against a minority can be acceptable – nay, laudable – behavior according to halachah.
To truly decide whether you agree with Meir Kahane’s ideas, you would have to take a stand on several major issues that have split the Jewish people for much of our history. Each one of these issues is a plank in Kahane’s philosophy:
Is the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew in the “hardware” or the “software?” Hardware essentialists like the Maharal believe that there is an innate difference between Jewish and non-Jewish souls from birth. Software non-essentialists, like the Rambam, disagree and believe that the ideals that we transmit from generation to generation are what distinguish our beliefs and behaviors from those of the nations around us.
What is the true chilul Hashem: the appearance of Jewish powerlessness or the performance of actions viewed by the world and our conscience as oppressive?
What kinds of actions on the part of Jews can hasten the coming of the Messiah?
What is the role of revenge in Jewish thought, and is it left to G-d or demanded of us?
To best survey the philosophy of Meir Kahane, it pays to contrast it to the evolution of the thought of one of his acolytes, Yossi Klein Halevi. Today, Klein Halevi is best known as the author of Like Dreamers, which won the National Jewish Book Award. But he describes his original attraction to Kahane and eventual disillusionment in Memoirs of Jewish Extremist: The Story of a Transformation. For a more recent and brief summation, see his Times of Israel blog from February 4, 2019. Growing up in Boro Park as the son of a Holocaust survivor who escaped Hitler by digging a hole and living in it for years, young Yossi first absorbed from his father the message that anti-Semitism is an irrevocable fact of life. The Talmudic adage: “halakha – Eisav sonei l’Yaakov” was to be taken literally. Yet today, Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and his primary responsibilities lie in interfaith activities. He describes the original allure of extremism that led him to join Kahane’s Jewish Defense League: “How does one live as a Jew in this world after the Holocaust? I surrendered to the purity, the thrill of rage. What, after all, could be more noble than embodying the suppressed resentments of those wounded by history?” What got him to leave? It’s a long story, but he ultimately writes that “I learned that the qualities we often regard as the best part of us turn out to be precisely those we need to overcome” (Memoirs, Intro).
In 2019, Klein Halevi recalled, “I had my doubts about Kahane. There was something in him that seemed unformed, childish. He didn’t just advocate, but celebrated violence. I hated when he formed an alliance with an Italian-American front group for the Mafia, in exchange for legal support for his court cases. How could he sully our cause? I mistrusted his commitment to ahavas Yisrael, love for the people of Israel. No one I knew spoke more incessantly of love for his fellow Jews, and no one I knew hated as many Jews as he did, reviling his opponents as traitors.” In his lifetime, Kahane was ostracized in Israel. “Kahane remained isolated within the settlement movement and, of course, within the wider religious Zionist community. Respectable, middle-class Orthodox Jews didn’t like him. The distaste was visceral, aesthetic: The rabbi with the American-accented Hebrew who acted as if Israelis were Brooklyn Jews in need of his vigilante protection, whose Torah commentaries were embarrassingly simplistic and who confused the optimistic messianism of Rav Kook for an alien apocalypticism, who called Arabs ‘dogs’ and snarled when he spoke, whose followers were most emphatically not the boys you would want your daughters to marry: Kahane was not, as they say in the religious world, ‘one of us.’”
The term “apocalypticism,” which Klein Halevi uses, refers to Kahane’s theology that I have referenced above. Kahane took the concept of vengeance (nekamah), which the Bible assigned to G-d alone, and argued that by Jews taking on the yoke of vengeance, we can redeem G-d, who was brought low by the Holocaust, and rouse Him so that He will redeem us. To those who argue that expelling Arabs would isolate Israel from the entire world, Kahane would likely respond that such isolation is precisely the point. By bringing ourselves to that point, we will trigger the ultimate redemption. Needless to say, this theology is far from universal. More accurately, it is terrifying. Is it any wonder that Rav Yehuda Amital, who saw the purpose of the State of Israel as kiddush Hashem, rather than vengeance, is quoted by Prof. Yehuda Mirsky as expressing his consternation that any beis midrash would “let this Kahane through the door”? (Tradition Magazine 55:3)
A final aspect of Kahane’s modus operandi that should be noted is his willingness, in the name of religion, to take violent action outside of the traditional chain of halachic command. He presented his arguments in articles and books, but I am not aware of his consulting with great halachic authorities of his day and receiving the legal green light for his policies. It is true that The Jewish Press once printed a list of rabbis who purportedly lent him support or spoke well of him, but a stray remark is far from a halachic imprimatur. Kahane was not deciding questions of whether to repeat an Amidah or consume legumes on Passover. He was advocating national moves that would risk many lives and affect the national destiny.
All this is why I shudder with dread when Rabbi Schonfeld, a well-respected rabbi with a national profile, writes of Kahane that “He certainly was a wise man, derided or not. His vision of the future was born from a true love of Israel and the Jewish people.” I react with alarm when Elie Mischel, the editor of HaMizrachi Magazine, writes in the Bronx/Westchester Jewish Link of November 29 that we must expel the Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank: “Gaza, Judea and Samaria must be emptied of a corrupt and evil people. They must leave, one way or another (emphasis added MR). European countries welcomed tens of millions of refugees over the last eight years. A few million Gazans should be comparatively easy to absorb when divided among many nations.”
Yossi Klein Halevi draws a line from Kahane to Baruch Goldstein to Yigal Amir to Otzma Yehudit and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Kahanism has not been a dormant philosophy after the assassination of its originator. And it threatens to overwhelm the better judgment of many too emotionally battered to resist.
To the question, Kahane Chai? The answer is: Only if we revive an ethos that was born of rage, fanned the rage of others, and sought to bring the apocalypse through acts of rage.
By Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg
