Indeed, according to a new biography by scholar Shaul Magid, Kahane represented the “underbelly” not only of American Orthodoxy, but of American Jewry writ large. In “Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical,” Magid — a professor and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College — invites all mainstream American Jewish institutions to grapple with their role in creating Kahane and perpetuating his ideas today.
Menachem Butler, an American researcher on Jewish law, has suggested that the rabbi is a kind of Rorschach test for American Jewry: that the various ways Jews remember Kahane and his legacy reveal more about how they view themselves and their community than about Kahane’s life itself. Mainstream Jewish institutions have condemned Kahane’s racist violence and minimized any shared heritage with him, his followers, and his ideas, in deference to a self-perception among American Jews as an exceptionally progressive community with stalwart liberal commitments.
Over the decades, liberal American Jews have managed to mostly limit introspection about Jewish reactionary violence — when they have entertained it at all — to the Israeli military, or to a few extremist West Bank settlers, not least Goldstein. These reflections maintain a thick line of separation between “us” (moderate, reasonable, peaceful Jews), and “them” (extremist, fundamentalist, and violent Jews). But Magid’s induction of Kahane as a quintessential, canonical American-Jewish thinker explodes any attempt to disaffiliate Kahane from mainstream American-Jewish life. In this, Magid reflects a recent spirit of reckoning with the violent and chauvinistic undercurrents of American society, pursued with renewed urgency during the Trump era.
It is against this backdrop that Magid has systematically analyzed Kahane’s voluminous writings, joining other scholars who have disproved the idea that there was ever a Jewish liberal consensus in the United States. The biography pushes those who would dismiss Kahane as a fringe extremist to reckon with the fact that many of his ideas are today uncontroversially embraced by American-Jewish organizations, not to mention the Israeli government. These include Kahane’s denunciations of assimilation and intermarriage; his support for Jewish settlements in the occupied territories; his obsession with “black antisemitism” and antisemitism on the left; and his promotion of nationalism and militarism. And although Magid acknowledges that Kahane was a “middle-brow thinker,” more skilled as an orator and youth leader than as an original theoretician, he takes Kahane’s philosophy seriously precisely because of its widespread acceptance.