Kahane’s ghost

The JDL founder’s legacy was a disaster, but he remains a specter haunting American Jewry.

My new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.

Recently, I posted on X: “If you insist on Mamdani, you will get Kahane.”

The usual suspects denounced me, widely misrepresenting my statement as an endorsement of violence and even terrorism, though I explained on each occasion that I was simply offering a warning: When you leave the Jews no way out, some will submit and some will flee, but others will fight. The question is: how are they going to fight? If they are given no path toward legal and moral self-defense, I believe, they will turn to Kahane-style illegal and immoral self-defense, and this bodes ill for all involved.

What this small controversy illustrated to me, however, was the strange but perennial potency of the memory of Rabbi Meir Kahane himself.

Best known as the founder of the JDL, a Jewish militant organization most active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Kahane remains both legendary and wildly controversial. The reason is that, though it began as a small local self-defense organization, the JDL ultimately turned to unabashed extremism and violence, designated a terror organization by the US government, and finally broken up by law enforcement through various means.

As for Kahane himself, he decamped to Israel, where he came to define the extreme right, was rightfully barred from the Knesset for racism, and consistently advocated the replacement of Israel’s democracy with a theocratic state from which all Arabs had been expelled. Ultimately, he was assassinated by an Arab terrorist in 1990, but his legacy has remained powerful, with his acolyte Itamar Ben-Gvir serving in the current Israeli government.

I will not mince words on the subject of this legacy. I believe that it was an unmitigated disaster, especially in the United States. Besides poisoning Israeli politics, Kahane poisoned Jewish self-defense, discrediting the very idea of Jewish militancy and resistance for several generations. Because of Kahane’s endorsement of extremism, illegality, and violence, the majority of American Jews came to identify self-defense with all three, making effective interdiction of antisemitism—especially today—unthinkable, even if legally and morally conducted.

Yet, quietly but persistently, Kahane’s ghost remains powerful. He has become a kind of specter haunting the American Jewish psyche. Israelis by and large know what they think of him, good or bad, but American Jews do not, though they almost never speak his name.

Indeed, several times in recent years, as American antisemitism has become an existential threat to US Jews, I have had people quietly tell me, “We need another JDL.” I believe, for various reasons, that another JDL is precisely what we don’t need, but that is another subject. What is clear is that American Jews are increasingly desperate for some kind of movement that can strike back and subdue antisemitic violence, an organization that both protects the community and salvages the Jewish soul from despair and humiliation. The only example they have of such a movement, like it or not, is the JDL, and Kahane, to an enormous extent, was the JDL—its charismatic symbol, primary ideologue, and most persuasive advocate.

I must say in this regard that a revival of Kahanism, small but persistent, appears to be taking place in the US. We hear strange rumblings, portents of the emergence of a new and fanatical militancy, one that forgoes legality and morality in the name of Jewish pride and strength. Indeed, even the defunct JDL is being revived in another form. This, again, bodes ill for all involved, but it is happening and it is, to an extent, understandable.

It is understandable because, as I warned, if the Jews are given no way out, no path to legal and moral self-defense, many will choose illegal and immoral self-defense. It is inevitable. The American Jewish community is, after all, several centuries old, it helped build the United States, and many Jews will not give it up without a fight.

At the moment, American Jews have no way out and no such legal and moral path. We see this in the short work New York has recently made of its few tiny Jewish extremist groups. I do not endorse such groups, but I must note the double standard: Antisemitic extremist groups that advocate genocide and ghettoization have been tolerated and even encouraged for two and a half years by New York authorities. Some powerful politicians and officials, like New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, have participated in them. There is no sign that New York will ban them or even take effective action against them. Yet their far less extreme Jewish counterparts are, instantly and effectively, wiped out. The outrage this engenders among more militant Jews will, I believe, eventually have terrible consequences for New York and beyond.

This double standard extends even to the figure of Kahane himself. Kahane was many ugly things, most particularly an ethnocentric chauvinist bigot who advocated violence. Nonetheless, he never said anything the likes of Malcolm X didn’t say, yet Malcolm is a revered cultural icon and Kahane verboten. Clearly, some extremists are more equal than others, when all should be equally condemned.

In some ways, however, it may be that Kahane haunts American Jewry because he was inevitable. It is remarkable, in fact, that it took so long for someone like him to emerge, because Kahane was, above all, Jewish rage personified. He promised vengeance for all we have suffered, to make the bastards pay. Rage is inevitable for any oppressed people, and Jews have been oppressed for 2,000 years, largely without expressing that rage. Kahane, at long last, did so, and the appeal of this is an intoxicating one. Today, with American Jewry under siege and threatened with ghettoization and even expulsion, it can only be more intoxicating than ever.

The rise of an American Kahanism would be, I believe, a disaster, but it is a disaster that can only be headed off by embracing an uncomfortable path. The only answer to illegal and immoral self-defense is to foster legal and moral self-defense. Unless American Jewry, and especially the American Jewish leadership, meets this challenge and forges such a path, I fear that the ghost of Kahane will become more than a ghost, with implications that, for the moment, no one has even begun to contemplate.