The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought. Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment. This incisive book shows how Kahane was a quintessentially American figure, one who adopted the radicalism of the militant Left as a tenet of Jewish survival.
Author
The Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies Director of Graduate Studies, Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program My teaching focuses primarily on Kabbala, Hasidism, religious fundamentalism, Israel/Palestine, and modern and American Jewish thought and culture. Areas of interest and research include sixteenth century Kabbala, Hasidism, American Judaism, comparative religion, and contemporary conceptions of Jewish religiosity. I am the editor of God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Essays on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (SUNY Press, 2001), co-editor of Beginning Again: Toward a Hermeneutic of Jewish Texts (Seven Bridges Press, 2002) and author of Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008) which was awarded the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for best book in religion in the textual studies category, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013) and Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). I am the series editor for “Post-Rabbinic Judaisms” for Academic Studies Press. I am also a regular contributor to Tikkun Magazine, Zeek Magazine, Open Zion, and Religion Dispatches.
