Meir Kahane
The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival
Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought.
Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment.
This incisive book shows how Kahane was a quintessentially American figure, one who adopted the radicalism of the militant Left as a tenet of Jewish survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dartmouth Jewish Studies professor Magid (Hasidism Incarnate) examines in this enlightening and accessible study how Jewish Defense League (JDL) founder Meir Kahane (1932–1990) "used the tactics of the far left in the service of a right-wing critique of American Jewry." Magid places Kahane, who believed that "preemptive violence" was necessary to prevent another Holocaust, and the JDL, whose members instigated riots and bombed Soviet cultural institutions in the U.S. to protest the Kremlin's persecution of Jewish dissidents, within the context of the Weather Underground and other radical political groups of the era. After receiving a suspended prison sentence for illegal activities related to the JDL, Kahane emigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded a right-wing political party whose platform called for the expulsion of all Arabs from the country. Though Magid describes Kahane as "a destructive force against human decency," he takes the tenets of Kahanism seriously, including the insight that the demands of preserving a Jewish state run counter to the ideals of Western democracy, and persuasively argues that Kahane was a major influence on the American Jewish establishment's "conservative turn" in recent decades. The result is a nuanced and eye-opening portrait of an overlooked figure in Jewish political history.