Welcome to another episode of Israel Open Mic – i.e., my favorite episodes, where we answer your questions. Yes, you, our amazing community, who are so smart and curious and engaged, who write the best emails and ask the best questions ever.
And this question, which came from so many different people – including some of my colleagues – well, this one is a doozy: Why is everyone suddenly talking about Meir Kahane?
Ok, actually, that’s the gentle version of this question. Someone I know phrased it a little more, uh, spicily: “Noam, can you explain why previously sane people are suddenly resuscitating this guy?”
Depending on your political affiliations, you’re either saying “yep, sounds right” or shaking your head like “Noam, have some respect. Like honestly! Come on.” Or maybe you’re like, I’m lost. Meir who? What’s happening? And why is this such a big deal?
So, if you’re in that last group, here’s the TL;DR:
As one of the top educators out there, Menachem Leibtag, taught me years ago:
Objective analysis and then subjective interpretation. So often, people love to editorialize right away. They love to do that before reporting. So first, let’s do objective analysis, and then subjective interpretation.
Again, first objectively, or as, to be honest, as objectively as possible.
Who was Meir Kahane?
Meir Kahane was a controversial American-Israeli rabbi, activist, writer, and politician. In the States, he’s probably best known for founding the Jewish Defense League to empower Jews to fight antisemitism – sometimes, through violence. This was the era of Black Power and other pride movements, so why not a little defense of the Jews?
But in Israel, Kahane is best known for his political ideology, cleverly-titled Kahanism, which has inspired a number of far-right Israeli politicians. He moved to Israel in the early 70s, and immediately made a splash. By 1980, he’d been arrested more than 60 times, even serving six months in Israeli administrative detention for “inciting terrorism”. But that didn’t stop him from running for office, and in 1984, he managed to garner just enough votes to earn a single seat in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. His colleagues in Knesset detested him, eventually passing a law to ban his party. Soon after, on a trip to New York, he was assassinated by an Egyptian extremist.
Ok, let’s start getting a bit more subjective now.
Because, it’s a colorful bio. And, it doesn’t explain why we’re still talking about him 35 years after his death. Ultimately, he was a minor politician with loud opinions. And yet, many Jews seem to know his name – even if they don’t know much about him.
So, why now? What happened?
Shortly after the stomach-turning handover of the Bibas family, prominent Jewish influencers began posting about Kahane. Sometimes, it was just a picture or a GIF, or a GIF; other times, it was a clip from one of his many speeches. Most of the time, the posts claimed “he was right.”
It was an echo of the graffiti you see sometimes in Israel, scrawled in Hebrew in the alleyways and bus stops. Kahana Tzadak. Kahane was right. Or Kahane Chai. Kahane lives, sometimes, accompanied by a drawing of a raised fist inside a Jewish star, a star of David.
I’ve been going to Israel since I was a kid. At first, I barely noticed it – it was just part of the landscape, on the periphery maybe.
But with every trip, with every war, the graffiti seemed to multiply. By the time I arrived for my post-high school gap year, in Israel, during the Second Intifada, I knew enough to know that Kahane was, as the kids say, problematic. I also knew that after four years of near-daily terror attacks, Israelis were traumatized and exhausted. I’m not Israeli, I do not speak for Israelis, but I saw very clearly how traumatized and exhausted they were. With every rocket attack, every stabbing and car ramming and stone-throwing and kidnapping, the graffiti mushroomed. Kahane Tzadak, scrawled in the men’s bathroom of the Jerusalem Central Bus station. Kahane Tzadak, on the back of the seat in front of me on the train. Kahane Tzadak on lampposts, on electrical boxes, on city walls. And now, it’s 2025, and I’m seeing Kahane Was Right all over social media – shared by people I know, people I respect.
But for every Jewish influencer who shared a gif, or a gif, or a meme of Kahane, there was a competing voice, sounding the alarm. On February 24, the progressive Zionist organization Zioness, led by my dear friend Amanda Berman – what up, Amanda! – posted the following to X:
Meir Kahane was a monster… If you endorse him, support him, or platform his views, you are a terror supporter.
Soon, seemingly every Jewish or Israel-related podcast released their take on Kahane’s resurgence. Most of them can be boiled down to sure, Hamas is terrible, but Kahanism ain’t it, Chief.
But we’re gonna do something a little different. You know that.
My job isn’t to validate any one perspective. It’s to excavate and explore even the darkest corners of Israeli history. And that means avoiding the instinct to recoil from Kahane’s ideas, or to self-righteously judge everyone who endorses them, and instead to try and understand what his deal is, and why he’s enjoying a resurgence 35 years after his death.
Many of the people who shared these memes know very little about most of Kahane’s ideas. They’ve been exposed to a sliver of Kahanist thought, and in the depths of their pain and their grief, they’ve run with it. My friend, the actor Michael Rapaport, was one of the big names who reposted a one-minute clip of Kahane saying, and this is a direct quote, It’s better to have an Israel that is hated by the whole world than an Auschwitz that is loved by it.
Strong words. And fair words, in my opinion. Words very similar to Golda Meir’s famous quote, “The world hates a Jew who hits back. The world loves us only when we are to be pitied.” Or to Dara Horn’s eerily prescient 2021 book: People Love Dead Jews. Or to Bob Dylan’s epic song about Israel, Neighborhood Bully: “The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive/He’s criticized and condemned for being alive/He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin/He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.”
If that sentiment is all you know of Kahane, then why wouldn’t you post this brief clip? Why wouldn’t you endorse someone who was so proud and unapologetic about Judaism and Zionism?
A few weeks later, Rapaport posted about Kahane again. But this time, he didn’t say Kahane’s name. Instead, he wrote:
“Recently, some people have put out some content on social media that don’t reflect my beliefs or values. I’m grateful to those who have reached out to me, and I’m taking this opportunity to set a few things very clear. I don’t support terrorism or racism by extremists of any kind…”
See, there were some people who wanted to “cancel” him for the time being. But, not my thing.
I am going to put myself here…I was one of those people who reached out to him. Not to criticize, but to ask, I was wondering, did he know about all the other stuff Kahane had said and stood for, besides standing strong against terrorism. What some of his followers chose to do. Rapaport didn’t. In fact, he said to me – and this is a literal quote — “dude, I had no idea.”
I’m not naming and shaming, by the way. I’m telling this story with Michael’s full permission. One of the things I love about Michael Rapaport, love about the guy, is he genuinely wants to learn and grow. And whether you like his ideas or not, you like his style or not, you gotta deeply respect this about him. And if you think about it, this whole situation is exactly why this podcast exists. I’m not interested in judging people, or in making immediate assumptions about them. It’s so easy to sit back, and maybe even lazy, and do that. I’m interested in making sure everyone knows the broad truth about Israel, the truths about Israel – the good, the challenging, and the deeply uncomfortable. Very few things in life are black and white. You know that. Very few people are unremittingly evil. That includes Kahane… AND all the people who say he was right.
By the way, I’m not embarrassed to say this. I wasn’t an expert in Kahane before this. I’m still not an expert! To be honest, much of what I know involved other people’s reactions to him. Great people I love and respect dismissing him. Like a story I remembered about him having weird beef with Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, who was so influential that he’s known simply as the Rav, the rabbi. About him dismissing ideas from Rav Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook, aka the father of religious Zionism and the first Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, and same with his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, also a highly impressive scholar and figure. This is just a short list of people Kahane seemed to clash with.
But again, I wasn’t an expert. So when his name seemed to be everywhere, I figured that I owed it to myself to start doing the research. And I and my team read the books. (Some were better than others.) I listened to the podcasts. (Again, some better than others.) We watched Youtube videos of every speech we could find, even a video from 1985 of him debating Alan Dershowitz, by the way, shout out to Dershowitz’s hair and mustache at the time. I read his words, I read the words of his students, and I read the words of those who wrote about him. And look, I’m not an expert, I don’t claim to be, but I know a lot more now. And I want to share what I’ve learned with all of you. As you know, it’s not my style to react immediately, to be the first out of the gate, but to take it all in, to try to be patient, and rise above the noise. And then when it’s a little quieter, then we jump in there. I just believe people are more willing to hear things when things are quieter, but when things are loud and aggressive and cacophonous, it’s hard. Hard to hear ideas in defensive mode.
So let’s talk through some of Kahane’s ideas. Let’s explore how he got there. Let’s try and figure out, together, whether there’s any room for Kahane in our discourse, in our communities, in our thought.
This isn’t a new debate, by the way.
Kahane was controversial from the beginning. Wherever he went, he attracted controversy. Debates about whether he was a visionary… or a danger to the community and the soul of Zionism itself.
Big stuff.
I turned to a big guy, for big stuff, to make sense of it all. (Big like… intellectually big, to be clear. Not talking about his muscles here, though maybe they are big, I have no idea.) Gil Troy, that’s who I’m talking about, is one of the most knowledgeable, interesting, brilliant scholars about the story of Israel. Among his twelve books, he literally wrote the book on Zionism. His 2018 book The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland – Then, Now, Tomorrow is a compilation of different strains of Zionist thought.
And he had to deal with this very paradox.
Who do you listen to? Who do you trust, when one flank of the Jewish people says one thing about Kahane… and the other says are you freaking kidding me???
This kind of debate is at the heart of Jewish discourse. And no matter what side of it you’re on, let’s remember to lead with empathy. There are good reasons for Kahane’s appeal. There are good reasons to find him toxic. We’ll explore them all. And if you’re still not sure after listening, and you want to keep going, not only is that okay, I love that! Look at the show notes. We used some really fascinating sources for this episode. Especially just to learn about his biography – the guy had an insane life! By the time he was 30, he’d been an FBI informant, an undercover agent infiltrating extremist groups, a pro-Vietnam agitator, an Orthodox rabbi, a father… and I’m barely scratching the surface here.
But as interesting as his biography is, we’re here to explore his ideas, so I’ll recount only the events that I feel may have shaped those ideas.
OK. I think that’s enough caveats and throat clearing for now. Let’s get into it.
—
Martin-slash-Meir Kahane was born in Brooklyn in 1932, to Sonia and Charles, firebrand immigrants from Russia and Mandatory Palestine, respectively. Charles spent the 1930s running guns for the Irgun, the pre-state militia that we’ve covered in many prior episodes. He idolized Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, and in 1936, he invited Jabotinsky to Brooklyn for a long visit. Meir, only four at the time, fell in love instantly. Sonia Kahane later recalled that her son, barely more than a toddler, followed Jabotinsky from room to room. She claims that Jabotinsky once instructed the young Kahane to, quote, “Follow in my footsteps, Meir.” I know, sounds fake. But hey, sometimes truth is more surreal than fiction. Though to be fair, he became very different than Jabotinsky.
Two years after Jabotinsky’s visit, the Kahane family was struck by a tragedy that would shape Meir’s future. Along with three other unlucky passengers, Meir’s great-aunt, aunt, and one-year-old cousin were ambushed on the road to their home in Tzfat. It was 1938, the thick of the Arab Revolt, which we’ve covered extensively in a three-part mini series. Violence was tearing apart the Holy Land. Most of the victims of the attack died instantly… though one young woman, not related to the Kahanes, suffered a fate so gruesome I won’t repeat it here.
Meir was just a kid, thousands of miles away from the massacre of family members he’d never met. And as his mother later told his biographer, this is the moment that he developed a hatred of Arabs. That hatred grew when his bereaved uncle, Mordechai, moved in, having lost his wife, child, and mother-in-law in one horrible morning. Mordechai and Charles spent hours discussing politics and history. Together, they captivated Meir with stories of Biblical warriors, Jewish heroism, and Arab savagery.
But like most Jewish kids in the 1940s, Meir didn’t need to be told about the world’s savagery towards Jews. He saw the evidence firsthand, as Holocaust survivors with haunted eyes began to trickle into the neighborhood. As a ten-year-old, he couldn’t understand why President Roosevelt had declined to bomb the railroad tracks to Auschwitz. And here’s my insertion…I also don’t understand it. Kahane channeled his confusion and his pain and his rage into writing comics about a Jewish superhero he called Bagelman, who swooped in whenever a Jew needed saving.
Even in Brooklyn, Jews did sometimes need saving – particularly from the neighborhood toughs who made it a habit to beat up on the Jewish kids at the playground. As a teenager, Meir saved his 12-year-old brother from being beaten nearly to death by bullies screaming “we want to kill the Yid!” when he charged into the park, accompanied by the NYPD.
But the NYPD couldn’t be everywhere at once. They couldn’t prevent hoodlums from beating up Jews or graffiti-ing local synagogues with swastikas. When Meir was 20, his father returned from a frustrating meeting with the police. “They can’t do anything, Charles told his son. “Jews should organize an underground.”
It would take well over a decade, but eventually, his son did just that. Meir Kahane was deeply influenced by his father.
In the meantime, Meir did what young people do: Finished his education. Got married. Had kids. Got investigated by the FBI for his, and I quote from their report, “subversive tendencies.” Normal stuff.
Kahane was 29 when Israel won the Six Day War in 1967, which lit up the Jewish world, just lit it up. Jewish pride and self confidence were swelling. But for Meir, the war didn’t change much. It just confirmed what he already believed: one, Jews are at their best when they aren’t afraid of their own power. And two, the very concept of Jewish power wasn’t popular or comfortable for many people.
As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, the Six Day War was a turning point for anti-Zionists, too. Soviet propaganda had turned Zionism into a dirty word – a stand-in for American imperialism, racism, and oppression. Movements, including the Black Panthers, adopted this rhetoric wholesale.
This was bad news for Brooklyn Jews.
One of my favorite topics outside the story of Zionism and Israel is Black-Jewish relations.
Now, you know my theory of education at this point…Teach the good, the bad and the ugly. Well, part of the Black and Jewish story is the beautiful story of Heschel and MLK, yes…And it also includes some more sordid and tense moments.
One such moment was in 1968. Racial tensions in New York City escalated when Black and Latino families pushed for control over their local schools, demanding the power to hire and fire teachers. In one Brooklyn district, in a neighborhood called Brownsville, a Black school board leader abruptly dismissed 19 teachers—most of them Jewish—without warning or due process. This outraged the Teachers Union, which was 60% Jewish and often white presenting, and this deeply angered Kahane. Just a decade earlier, Jews had marched alongside Black activists in the fight for civil rights, even suffering violence and death in solidarity. Now, Kahane saw what he believed was a betrayal, as Jewish teachers were scapegoated and Jewish neighborhoods, already in decline, became increasingly unsafe for those who remained.
The hostility toward Jews intensified, with Black activists accusing them of controlling the school system and deliberately harming Black students. A local magazine claimed Jewish teachers kept Black children “ignorant,” and a teacher read an openly antisemitic poem on the radio, calling for the death of a Jewish union leader. As violence and antisemitic rhetoric spread, Kahane saw Jews as defenseless and abandoned. Remembering his father’s advice from years earlier, he believed that the only way to protect Jewish lives and dignity was to create a Jewish underground—an organized force to defend his community.
And that’s how the Jewish Defense League was born. Its twin slogans “Never Again” and “Every Jew a .22” – as in, Jews, get strapped. No one is coming to defend you. You want safety? You have to fight for it.
At first, Jewish teachers, alarmed by their colleagues’ antisemitism, flocked to the JDL, which seemed to be standing up for Jewish rights. They raided the radio station that had broadcast the antisemitic poem. They took over school board meetings to defend Jewish teachers. They picketed and demonstrated and scrapped with anyone who challenged Jewish rights. Armed JDL men patrolled mixed neighborhoods, which didn’t exactly quell racial tensions.
My father, who might be one of the most level headed people I know, told me that he heard Kahane speak on a number of occasions, and he was moving, riveting, and compelling. That good people around him were proud of the JDL, that they felt protected. And soon, the JDL set its sight on a much bigger target: the USSR. Yep, this episode has everything! A ragtag grassroots American Jewish defense group had declared war on the Soviet empire – with the secret help of the Mossad. (And, by the way, why would the Mossad use the JDL to fight the USSR? It’s a wild story. The links are in the show notes.)
So the JDL attacked Soviet diplomats in the US and Europe; firebombing their offices and cars, sending them letter bombs, and even boarding Russian flights to spray-paint Am Yisrael Chai all over the cabins. The JDL even took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, which ended with “Someday, your children and grandchildren will ask you: ‘What did you do for the Soviet Jews? What will you say?”
To many young Jewish people, Kahane was a hero – a modern day Maccabee, fighting for what was right. By 1970, his organization counted thousands of members across the world.
But not everyone was thrilled with the JDL. His Mossad handlers may have loved Kahane, but mainstream Israeli leaders certainly didn’t. Golda Meir called the JDL “irresponsible,” and that was putting it mildly. A number of Soviet Jews backed her up, complaining that the JDL’s antics were putting them in danger, giving their government a pretext to deny them their exit visas.
The US government, meanwhile, was getting an earful from Soviet leaders. President Richard Nixon worried, out loud, that the JDL was jeopardizing the US’s Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets. The State Department was sending dire memos to the FBI. They even asked Rabbi Moshe Feinstein – a giant of American Judaism – to call off Kahane. Rabbi Feinstein told him, in no uncertain terms, “you are putting Jewish lives in danger.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Jews have never agreed with each other on how to claim our own power. Zealots have always fought against moderates. Maccabees versus Hellenizers, Sicarii versus ordinary Jews, Lehi and the Irgun versus the Haganah. In the 1970s, it was the militancy of the JDL and its Mossad backers, butting up against the “quiet diplomacy” of the Israeli government, American Jewish Federations, and other organizations towards the USSR.
But that wasn’t Kahane. Kahane was extreme, which meant he was enthusiastic. He was inspiring, rabble-rousing. He got things done. He was countercultural, which appealed to the young, the disenfranchised, the cynical. He promised radical change, warning his followers, quote: “Do not listen to the soothing anesthesia of the establishment. They walk in the paths of those whose timidity helped bury our brothers and sisters less than thirty years ago.” It’s hard to counter that kind of enthusiasm, if you’re a moderate. It’s hard to fight against that kind of conviction. Especially when the messenger is so unapologetic. So certain.
And then, after years of rabble rousing in the States, in September of 1971, Kahane boarded a plane for Israel. We don’t exactly know what the final cause was, but we know that Meir’s wife and children had already moved there. We also know that he had said that, quote, “the true solution to the Jewish problem is the liquidation of the Exile and the return of all Jews to Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.”
But whatever the reason, Israel seemed a natural next step. He already had a glowing reputation among the Israeli right wing. After all, this was a Jew who fought back. Soon, different right-wing parties offered the charismatic rabbi a place in their ranks. But he turned down Menachem Begin’s Herut, the precursor to today’s Likud. He refused to join the National Religious Party, for fear he’d be muzzled, forced to tow the party line instead of speaking his truth.
It was 1971, and the Israeli right was more on the margins. The left-wing and relatively dovish Labor Party had been in charge since Day One. Begin’s party wouldn’t rise to prominence until the election of 1977. And Kahane didn’t want to be a small fish in a big pond, having to wait his turn and play politics and vote with the party. He dreamed of bigger things, of being in charge.
So he opened up a branch of the JDL in Israel. And if you’re like, um, why did he need the JDL when the IDF exists, well, good question, the Israeli establishment asked that too. At first, he treated the Israeli branch of the JDL like a school, teaching philosophy, religion, and Zionism for eight hours a day. But behind the scenes, he was building a tiny underground militia to firebomb Israeli churches, harass Israel’s tiny community of Black Hebrew Israelites, and terrorize Israel’s Arab citizens. (Nerd corner alert: Israel’s Black Hebrew Israelites are one branch of an ideologically diverse Black American religious movement that draws much of its inspiration from Judaism. The Israeli rabbinate does not consider the Hebrew Israelites to be Jewish. But these Black Hebrews, despite sharing a name and common roots, are not the same as the antisemites who have harassed Jewish people on the streets of New York.)
The American branch of the JDL had targeted PLO officials as well as Arab embassies. Once in Israel, Kahane stepped up his attacks. Within two years of his arrival in Israel, he found himself in front of a judge on charges of sedition, for mailing thousands of letters offering Arab citizens money to leave Israel.
Up til now, I’ve been pretty gentle in describing Kahane. I’ve talked about Jewish pride, Jewish self-defense. I’ve talked about taking action. I’ve talked about getting things done. About how proud Jewish people around my father were taken by him. How Kahane was (justifiably!) enraged about the Holocaust, antisemitism, the Soviet suppression of Judaism, and PLO terrorism.
Good.
Here’s the thing.
Running underneath all of that, powering his actions like an invisible current, was his sincere belief that Jews were better than non-Jews. Here’s one thing he said: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the soul of a non-Jew is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the soul of an animal.” (And by the way, nerd corner alert: he didn’t get this from nowhere. There are some Kabbalistic teachings that have said similar things. Though it’s not my personal belief, nor the belief of many of the great rabbis and teachers, I have to be honest. Remember, we share multiple shades here, folks. Okay, back to Kahane.)
The thing is that whereas some medieval philosophers may have internalized this in a theoretical way, Kahane implemented this worldview, in a belief that Jews were fundamentally better than non-Jews and it meant there could never be equality between the two. Not in the US, and certainly not in Israel. Again, this is a theme he came back to over and over: he was not embarrassed, he was proud to say, for example, that “Non-Jews have no place in the Land of Israel. It belongs to the Jewish people, and to them alone.”
That is why so many people are horrified by his resurgence. Not because we’re opposed to Jewish pride or to Jewish self-defense. Not because we feel guilty about standing up for ourselves. Because the first book of the Bible tells us that humans are made in God’s image. All humans. Every single one.
But to be a Kahanist, you have to reject that belief. You have to see it as inauthentic, somehow not truly Jewish, even though it’s right there in the Torah, ink on the parchment: tzelem elokim. Imago Dei. In the image of God.
From my understanding, to be a Kahanist is to be a Jewish supremacist with a strict hierarchy. At the top are Jews. At the very, very bottom, under white non-Jews and Black non-Jews and whoever else were Arabs, for whom he reserved his most fervent animosity.
That’s it. That’s the ideology that powers his whole movement. That’s why Gil Troy, and a million other scholars say very clearly that Kahanism is not synonymous with “being right wing.” You can be incredibly right wing and anti-Kahane’s views. That’s why it’s not the same as saying Hamas has gotta go. Or saying I don’t trust Gazans, or the Palestinian Authority, or even Palestinians in general. You can say all these things without being a Kahanist, because you can distrust or fear people who have hurt you without believing that they are inherently inferior to you. Without believing that you are inherently superior to them.
Kahane firebombed churches and terrorized Black Hebrews and sent nasty letters to Arab citizens of Israel because none of these people were Jews, and yet they were living in the Land of Israel. Because he thought that the Jewish state should be for Jews and no one else. He also believed that a Jewish state should be entirely Jewish. That it should follow and enforce Jewish laws. That it should be the anti-democratic Jewish theocracy that so many critics of Israel imagine it to be.
And look, Kahane was an ordained rabbi. He spent years learning Torah. He impressed people with his charisma and his passionate speeches and his fiery writing. He wrote a lot of books and argued with a lot of other rabbis. But all the sources I’ve read say the same thing: he just wasn’t a world-class intellectual.
And by the way, I’m not trying to be that snobby guy. I’m also not a world-class intellectual! At all. Few people are. And I’m not saying he wasn’t smart. He was clearly smart, he clearly had intelligence. What I’m really saying is that he seemed to lack a certain humility, automatically dismissing anyone who disagreed with his narrow and limited reading of Jewish sources. Giants of religious scholarship, rabbis of towering stature – Maimonides, aka the Rambam. THE FREAKING RAMBAM. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who was so influential that he’s known simply as the Rav, the rabbi. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, aka the father of religious Zionism and the first Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine. His son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, also a highly impressive scholar. This is just a short list of people whose ideas he dismissed.
Judaism isn’t a dogmatic religion. The Talmud is literally a record of hundreds of years of disagreements between rabbis about the most minute points of Jewish law. Disagreement is healthy. Disagreement is good. But Kahane wasn’t merely disagreeing.
On Rabbi Scott Kahn’s excellent podcast, Orthodox Conundrum, he recently had a fascinating conversation with Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Sinensky, about the theological elements of Kahanism. I’m gonna play from that conversation here:
“He simply told you why everyone else is wrong and he was right. That’s not only mean, that’s only nasty, that’s not only poisonous, toxic for discourse, for Jewish unity, and so on and so forth, which he insisted that he was all about, Jewish unity. But these very tactics undermined it.”
Kahane applied this dismissive attitude to anyone who disagreed with him. Which meant that he wasn’t particularly fussed when he was hauled in front of an Israeli court on charges of sedition. Instead, he used the case, which was eventually thrown out, to drum up publicity for his new political party, Kach.
It would take more than a decade of rabble-rousing for Kach to earn a single seat in the Knesset. And once they got there? What do you think happened? Did Kahane moderate? Did he begin to work with others?
Come on, you know the answer. Of course not.
He used his status as a Member of Knesset to visit Arab towns, for the express purpose of publicly demanding they leave Israel. Of course, the residents of these towns rioted. Of course, Kahane used the rioting as opportunity to say, see?? Further proof these maniacs don’t belong in the Jewish state!
But Kahane wasn’t just a public nuisance. He seemed to take a real delight in being as outrageous as possible. Most of his fellow MKs didn’t like him, they disparaged him, walking out of the Knesset rather than listen to him speak. When he proposed sterilizing all Arab criminals in 1985, the Knesset called in security to physically remove him.
And let me just say – I can’t imagine Kahane proposed legislation because he thought they had literally any chance of passing. He must have known his bills wouldn’t be taken seriously. Maybe he was trying to shift the Overton window on what was acceptable. In some cases, I think he thought he was just saying the quiet part out loud.
Take his proposed bill to expel all Arabs from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Of course the bill didn’t pass. But Kahane was reminding his more hawkish colleagues in Knesset that “population transfer” was an option. And there were, and still are, people who believe that the best, maybe only, solution to the conflict is for one party to just… leave.
In the end, though, Kahane’s ideas were just a bridge too far. The Knesset wasn’t interested in his proposal to criminalize public insults against Jews or Judaism. They definitely weren’t interested in his bill to outlaw romantic and sexual relationships between Jewish women and Arab men. (Yeah, you heard that correctly.) And they didn’t hesitate to compare his ideas to elements of Nazism.
After two years of Kahane’s antics, the Knesset passed the so-called Racism Law in 1986, which barred parties that incited racism from running in elections. This law effectively disqualified Kahane and Kach from the 1988 election, forcing him out of politics.
So Kahane took his message beyond the Knesset. He delivered fiery speeches in public parks, railing against Arabs, left-wing Jews, and the Israeli government. He urged Jewish youth to “take action” – a nice euphemism for “harassing Arab shopkeepers” and “beating up Arabs in the street.”
Despite his political ban, Kahane continued to raise money under the Kach banner, securing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jewish donors in the U.S. and Europe. He trafficked in fear: fear of assimilation. Fear of Diaspora Jewry disappearing. Fear of Arab violence. And fear is a powerful motivator. The money poured in, funneled towards things like building settlements in Arab-majority areas and paying the legal fees for some people on the more extreme Jewish right.
Death came for Kahane in November of 1990. He’d just finished speaking to a mostly-Orthodox crowd at the Marriott Hotel in Manhattan. An El-Sayyid Nosair was dressed like an Orthodox Jew, which made it easy for him to approach Kahane after the speech and shoot him, kill him, assassinate him, point-black, in the neck.
Kahane was killed, but his ideas were not. They continued to inspire a small but determined fringe of the Israeli right.
Including Baruch Goldstein – the American-born doctor who led a more or less normal life until the morning he woke up and slaughtered 29 Muslims during their morning prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site sacred to Jews and Muslims.
Kach had been banned from running in elections, but after the Goldstein massacre, the Israeli government officially outlawed the party (and its successor, Kahane Chai), branding them both as terrorist organizations.
But new parties have emerged to take up their mantle. New figures have succeeded in bringing some of Kahane’s ideas to the mainstream. You probably know the name Itamar Ben-Gvir, who began his tenure as Minister of National Security in 2022. He was once an active Kahanist, famously keeping a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. Like Kahane, he’d been arrested dozens of times, for incitement as well as other crimes. His ideas are strikingly similar to Kahane’s – including his bid to expel all quote, unquote “disloyal” Arabs from Israel. His party, Otzma Yehudit, translates to Jewish Power – in an echo of Kahane’s obsession with power. My friend Gil Troy calls Otzma Yehudit “Kahanism with a shave and a haircut.” Troy has a way with words.
So have Kahane’s ideas clawed their way back to the Israeli mainstream? Will Ben Gvir succeed where Kahane could not, shifting the Overton window of what’s acceptable? How do we decide who’s in and who’s out? And at what point should we stamp out Kahanist ideas and declare them firmly out of bounds?
There’s no easy answer. My job has never been, and won’t be, to tell you the “right” answer. I leave it to you to decide for yourself.
But, for what it’s worth, here’s what Gil Troy had to say.
He dealt with this exact issue when compiling his book on Zionism. Ultimately, his tome on Zionism, which includes so many different thinkers, from the right to the left, to everything in between, it doesn’t include Kahane. Here’s why.
“Meir Kahane wrote amazing things about Jewish pride about Jewish power about he had a vision of a Jewish parliament which would involve diaspora Jews and Israelis, he wrote very eloquently about the need to fight against the Soviet Empire. As a Zionist movement, he had great Zionist writings. And I literally had one day where I sat with one person and I said, you know, should I include Kahane or not? He said, absolutely. The guy had unbelievable things about Zionism and was very important in the 1970s in shaping the Zionist conversation, especially in America. And somebody else said, equally, absolutely, you can’t include him because he crossed the red line. And when I went through the process, I decided very much that the second one was right, that indeed he did cross too many red lines and the beauty of Zionism is that it’s intertwined. It’s about Jewish nationalism, but it’s liberal democratic Jewish nationalism and you can’t separate the two. And at the end of the day, Kahane’s authoritarianism and his bigotry and his complete disregard for the 20% of Israel’s population who are Arabs and more than that, his disregard for certain fundamental values said to me he’s outside the tent. And I never looked back on that decision. To me, it was crystal clear”.
But when we pushed a little more, Troy said something fascinating.
“As a lecturer and professor who writes about Zionism and teaches about Zionism, I certainly want to learn from him as much as I can. But as an activist and as a citizen, I can also say there are red lines that we do not cross. And so I keep him out of my electoral tent and I keep him out of my values tent and I wouldn’t put up his picture in my sukkah if I was honoring Zionist heroes. But I certainly have no problem teaching texts of his. And in fact, it’s actually even more interesting to teach texts of his where you say, OK, he was right on A, he was right on B, he was right on C, but then he jumped to D. That’s already education. So I’m not really into cancellation, but I am into judgment depending on what hat I’m wearing, or my kippah”.
And that is the approach we’ve tried to take here. Kahanism, as Kahane meant it, crosses the red lines as I see it. I think of it as being violent and supremacist, as being in many ways antithetical to Judaism.
And.
And.
This is an important point.
The Israeli government failed on October 7th.
The State of Israel fell down on its promise to keep Jews safe.
In a single day, the Jewish people lost more than 1,200 precious souls, who trusted in the promises of their country and were betrayed.
And when someone comes along and says, the establishment failed you, but I’m anti-establishment and I will keep you and your children safe, that’s compelling.
And I have a really important note, so everyone pay attention. Those of us who haven’t spent the past 18 months running to bomb shelters, pounded by rockets from every front, serving in the army for months on end, away from our families, rallying for our hostages – in other words, for those of us who are not Israeli – it’s easy to say I would never support those terrible ideas.
It’s easy to forget who Hamas attacked on October 7th.
It wasn’t the right wing they attacked. It wasn’t people who supported Bibi. It wasn’t people who idolized Ben Gvir, or Baruch Goldstein, or Kahane.
It was the peace camp. It was the activists who founded groups dedicated to coexistence and dialogue. It was the people who drove sick Palestinian kids from Gaza to Israel, in their own cars, for lifesaving medical treatment. It was people who employed Gazans, who voted left, who organized peace rallies. It was kids at a rave celebrating peace and love. And they were burned alive. Taken hostage. Beaten, mutilated, tortured, raped. Some are still captive in Gaza.
Israeli society is still living that trauma of seeing their peace camp literally set on fire with relish, with pleasure. And those of us in the Diaspora – not serving in the army, not sacrificing our kids, not running to bomb shelters every day – we have no right to judge them. To tell them that they’re wrong, that they’re racist, that they’re beyond the pale.
Not now. Not with self-righteousness. Not in judgment or rebuke.
So I’ll leave you with this. The truth is, when I wrote my dissertation on Israel a decade ago, the whole idea was that you can be passionate about Israel and your people without sacrificing empathy for the other. That literally, literally was my thesis. So that’s me, you like it or not, that’s me. And so for me, I’ll be honest, he’s not the type of voice that I feel comfortable getting out there in such a profound way.
So Meir Kahane was influenced by his father, I was influenced by my father. So, I don’t mind sharing that I see this the way my father sees it now, the same father who was intrigued by him in the 70s. Now, my father pointed out to me that Kahane was clearly a complicated Jewish leader. My father explained that the story of Meir Kahane is the story of how one’s fierce pride and protectiveness of people you love can result in the breakdown of concern and consideration for people you perceive as the enemy. I learned from my father. And for me, that is something to pay close attention to.
Having said that…I say this all the time, and I’ve already said it in this episode. My job isn’t to tell you what to think. My job is to give you the information – ys, it’s biased, anyone tells you they’re not biased, don’t believe them. But I give you the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly – and give you permission to think for yourself. And this is where I’ll say once more my absolute favorite thing to say – I want to hear from you. Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me! How did you feel about Meir Kahane’s ideas before this episode? How do you feel now? How do you feel about what boundaries we should or shouldn’t have in our discourse?
You, the listener, what do you think? When telling the story of Israel, what do you think? Should his voice be included? Should it be featured? Should it be promoted? Should it be removed? Should it be excluded?
In the world of viewpoint diversity, this is a framing I learned from my friend Simon Greer, and I love it. What do you think?
My producer Rivky and I talked so much in prep for this episode, and our writer Adi Elbaz, just so much. But we don’t want to just talk to ourselves. We love hearing from you. So please, please, be in touch. Especially if you disagree, especially if you see things differently. If you are kind and thoughtful, it may even help me think about this differently. So shoot me an email – noam@unpacked.media. Be part of the conversation.