Magid, a Dartmouth professor of Jewish thought and man of the left who has written widely on Hasidism, Kabbalah, and contemporary Jewish life and politics, doesn’t make it his aim to deepen our knowledge of Meir Kahane’s life. His book is a thematic intellectual biography, focused on mapping “the trajectory of his thought in the context of the changing contours of postwar America and later in Israel during the development of right-wing Zionism in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Magid frames his study with an anecdote. A few years ago, he was at a bar mitzvah in a Modern Orthodox synagogue and told the guy next to him in the kiddush line that he was working on a book about Kahane. His new friend, who was a “professional-looking man, probably in his mid-fifties” and seemed “educated, friendly, and not particularly ideological,” told Magid, “If you want my opinion, I agree with everything Kahane said. Everything he predicted came true. He just should have said it in a nicer way.” This is a more genteel, American version of the “Kahane Tzadak” (Kahane Was Right) graffiti, which is still scrawled on Israeli walls.
Magid doesn’t agree, of course, but his study of Kahane is designed to show us how much twenty-first-century Jews have inherited from a man whom most have tried to forget. Although Kahane’s militancy has been rejected, Magid notes, “many of his basic precepts have been embraced among present-day American Jewry.” Kahane, Magid maintains, “is best viewed as a cultural icon who was able to shift the discourse of American Jewry, and later Israeli politics, through sheer will, perseverance, and maniacal certitude.” In its effort to show how Kahane did this, Magid’s book is, he writes, “an intervention into contemporary Judaism and Jewishness as much as it is a book about Meir Kahane.”
Kahane was, Magid observes, diametrically opposed to the “Jewish liberalism” of his day. He lambasted the liberal establishment for selling out Jewish substance and survival for life in suburbia, leaving the Jewish residents of ethnic neighborhoods behind to fight what he perceived as the real battles of a resurgent new antisemitism only two decades after the Holocaust. Whether antisemitism was a feature or a bug of the new Black radicalism, Kahane was convinced that it was the Jews who were getting squeezed, as Magid puts it, as a “middleman in the coming race wars.” But Jews could learn a thing or two from their opponents: “if the Black Panthers and Black Nationalists wanted to construct a new Black Man (or woman) through ‘Black is Beautiful,’” Kahane wanted to create a “New Jew” in opposition to what he called the “Uncle Irvings.”