How did Kahane understand Jewish ethnicity? You discuss in the book how he often held up converted Jews of color as important community members as a way of ducking allegations of racism, but how did Kahane actually define who a Jew was?
He had a pretty conventional understanding of who a Jew is. A Jew would be a person who inhabited a Jewish womb, born of a Jewish woman. That’s pretty much it for him. And that was not what interested him as much as what it meant to be a Jew. So one can be physically Jewish, but not actually a Jew. And that’s what he was trying to construct, a new way of being a Jew that cultivated pride in being Jewish as opposed to the image of the emasculated survivor quietly living a Jewish life without a mission other than hiding from antisemites.
Kahane’s whole project was pushing back against the post-war Jewish quiescence that was saying let’s keep our heads low and not make trouble. He used to tell a joke about two Jews in front of a firing squad. Both Jews are blindfolded and one calls out to the guards and says his blindfold is too tight, and the other one says “don’t make trouble.” Kahane felt like this was the quintessence of what the diaspora had done to the Jew. It has weakened them.
How did Kahane’s idea of survivalism—or the imperative to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people—affect the larger Jewish community?
Obviously Jewish survivalism is largely a Zionist trope, or it’s become one. So what Kahane wanted to do was take the Zionist survivalist model and transport it to the American diaspora. Just like Zionism is about muscularity and fighting back and a certain type of machismo and chauvinism, he asked why the diaspora can’t do that as well. People think about Kahane and they immediately think about Zionism and Israel. But earlier in his career, it wasn’t that he wasn’t a Zionist, but he wanted to save the American dream for the Jew. The JDL was a diasporic project.
But he goes to Israel in 1971, and by 1972 he said that the JDL should be about mass aliyah; we have to get as many Jews to move to Israel as possible. And his colleague, Bertram Zweibon, said no, that the JDL was about protecting Jews in America. So I think there was a breach of Kahane’s idea at some point. But his goal was to bring Zionist muscularity into the diaspora. In addition he tried to convince Knesset members to support his mass aliyah project and none seemed very interested. For them, it seemed that supporting Israel in America was the job of American Jews.