The following is a transcript of Episode 71 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer president of Shalom Hartman Institute North America, and we’re recording on Friday, October 1st, 2021, right off of the heels of the Jewish holidays back in anticipation of what might be a full work week. So if you follow Jewish news and I do and the show’s oftentimes interested in it, and we’re oftentimes inundated with Jewish political stories. One of the big stories out of Israel this past week was an attack by a group of settlers – about 60 settlers in the south Hebron Hills – on a Palestinian village of al-Mufaqara in which a three-year-old boy was injured, condemned by Israel’s alternative prime minister Yair Lapid, condemned by the American government. And once again, a kind of story about Jewish radicalism and political violence in the news.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
In the meantime here, back in the domestic side, kind of got lost a little bit over the Sukkot holiday for those of us who observe it – major question emerging in Congress, around additional legislation to provide additional support for Israel to replenish the Iron Dome batteries after this summer’s war, which was initially opposed almost exclusively by the progressive end of the democratic party and now is actually being held up in the Senate by Rand Paul a Republican Senator. And throughout this a continued realignment by Jews and Jewish organizations around the changing political climate. This is something of a hobby of mine, and it’s also a hobby of our guests today. I oftentimes found myself looking for larger narratives to explain the Jewish political story. Why, for American Jews, does politics, seems to live at the center of the Jewish condition? It certainly is the case in the State of Israel as well.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
There’s a theory on the landscape and that is my guest today is professor Shaul Magid, who is the author of a really newly published book. I think it’s already out. At least I have a copy from Princeton University Press. The book is called Meir Kahane: the Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Shaul is a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth. He’s a senior fellow here at the Shalom Hartman Institute in North America and Shaul’s book, which we’re going to talk about today, argues that Kahane is a far more relevant influence on American Jewishness, and I assume in that context, on the continued centering of a certain type of politics at the center of American Jewish identity, than he has long been considered. First of all, Shaul, thanks for coming on the show. And start us off by just telling us a little bit like personally and professionally you’re a little bit of a kind of omnivore of Jewish ideas and content, but why Kahane of all people? Why spend the last, I think, six years reading everything that Meir Kahane wrote, reading everything else people wrote about Meir Kahane, and trying to kind of fill this lacuna of scholarship by engaging with Kahane and his legacy.
Shaul Magid:
First of all, Yehuda, thank you for inviting me and showcasing the book. You know, it’s interesting that you ask that question, the introduction to the book I titled, “Why Kahane?” Because I think it is kind of a question of why would you spend all your time writing about somebody and why write about him now? I mean, there are more mundane reasons about how I discovered Kahane, which I talk about in the introduction to the book, a graduate student that I had in the university that had read a section of the chapter of mine in “American Post-Judaism” on the Holocaust where I talked a little bit about Kahane and decided to write an MA thesis on history and memory of Kahane. And so we basically started the hevruta of looking at Kahane’s writings from the early 1960s, 1962, up to the present. And I had read some of his stuff before, but only by reading him chronologically that I’ve come to realize that there there’s something going on about the way in which Kahane understood post-war America. In particular and the way in which I thought that his critique of liberalism as Jewish liberalism existed in post-war America, particularly the 1960s, which is a little bit different than now, I think was actually incisive and important in a way that has been overlooked because when people think about Kahane, they immediately think about Israel. And he did move to Israel in 1970, founded a political party that was ousted from the Knesset because of the racism law.
Shaul Magid:
And we all kind of know the basic history, but I felt that actually his way of thinking in the world really dug some deep roots into the American consciousness, separate from his tactics. And I think that one of the things I wanted to try to tease out in the book is that to think about Kahane as relevant today in America, you have to separate his worldview from his tactics. His tactic was militarism. His tactic was violence, but that was very much in the waters in the late 1960s, among the Black Panthers among the Young Lords. I mean, militarism and violence was something that existed from around 1965/1966 until 1974. So in that sense, he was very much a part of and a person of his time, but his worldview, I found to be very much a part of the subconscious of some of American Jewry, obviously not all of American Jewry.
Shaul Magid:
And I know that you, in particular, don’t like the term, the Jewish establishment, that was a term that he did like a lot. And maybe there was a Jewish establishment in the 1960s in ways that there isn’t now, but that’s the way he called it, right, in a certain way? I think that in a way Kahane is easier to deal with in Israel because he’s right out front. Because you have people that identify as Kahanist. Although I argue in the book that today’s Kahanists are not really Kahanists, they are really neo-Kahanists. And I can explain why I think that is, but Kahane is a kind of persona non grata in America. Nobody talks about him Nobody seems to think that he’s still relevant. And I think that’s where the danger lies. In that, there’s something in the subconscious that exists.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Great. So I definitely want to come back to the establishment piece and I also want to come back to this whole notion of persona non grata, because it actually, you could parse that data in two different ways. One is that he’s really important and therefore we don’t talk about him. And the other is that he’s not that important. That’s what I want to come back to later on. But let’s – I want to start with something a little bit more personal. I felt reading your book show that there were two – and you and I have talked about this for years – I’ve heard you present on Kahana. So it was also exciting to kind of see, you know, you spend a lot of time thinking about something, talking with someone about it and then to see it in print. So congratulations on getting it out and getting it done.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I think it’s a really significant contribution. It’s a book that I think a lot of people should read and get angry about it. Kahane, not you. Kahane. But there were two personal pieces to it. And the first one that felt personal was you even make reference to the fact that you said, I didn’t know him personally, but you described kind of inhabiting the same world. So first independent of Kahane, talk to me a little bit about like what it’s like to do the kind of scholarship where you know that you are kind of cooked in the same pot together with ideas like this. Like I also, you know, like for example, you make reference to a roommate that you who was a Kahanist. I remember once when I was on an Israel trip, a B’nai Akiva Israel trip, they sent us to, you know, kids’ houses for Shabbat.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And I go to this kid’s house and I don’t know, I think it was Bat Yam, some beach town, religious Zionist kid. And I come into his house and this is 1992 it’s right around the time of Madrid. And my Dad was negotiating Madrid on the American side and I go into their house and there’s this giant picture of Meir Kahane. And that’s like, it was right around right over the bed that I was supposed to sleep. We all kind of personal angles when it comes to Jewish scholars who study these stories. Tell me a little bit about like, what it was like for you to try to excavate something that you already felt in some ways adjacent to, right? And what was challenging or in what ways did that give you kind of access to this story that might’ve been different for a different scholar.
Shaul Magid:
You know, it’s funny that, sorry, that roommate, when I was living in Boro Park and going to yeshiva in Boro Park, living in Flatbush, and it was kind of very much a part of the Haredi world. I mean, this guy was a modern Orthodox Jew. This Kahanist was a modern Orthodox Jew. In the 1970s, late 1970s, he was very much just a part of the landscape. I mean, it was, he was somebody that a lot of people knew. He was somebody that brought together, interestingly people of very different kinds of religious persuasions, mostly within the Orthodox world. Haredim, yeshiva people, modern Orthodox people. There was something that was attractive in that world, which was struggling with on the one hand, a sense of an inability to know how to respond to the political realities that were happening around them. And then the other hand, in a certain sense, quite angry at the inability to come up with the solution to how they confront, the realities that were happening on the ground.
Shaul Magid:
And I don’t mean globally or nationally. I mean, what’s happening in Flatbush. What’s happening in Boro Park. What’s happening in Williamsburg. Issues of Antisemitism and so forth. So in a certain way, he provided an answer that, in some ways, seemed extreme. And on the other hand seemed very rational, which is simply that if you’re confronted with violence, you have to respond with violence. You have to fight back. I mean, why are Jews not fighting back? Why are Jews not angry about the situation that they’re in? And, you know, it’s funny that I knew Yossi Klein Halevi back in those days when, you know, he had already left the JDL, but he was still very much part of that world in terms of how he thought about things. And in a certain sense for me, I was a bit of an outsider, right, because I was part of the Haredi world.
Shaul Magid:
So I wasn’t part of the Kahanist world. And yet, you know, there was a kind of intermingling, intermixing between people in the Haim Berlin Yeshiva. I learned in a yeshiva that was across the street from Haim Berlin or in Flatbush and other places where he was just – his option, his alternatives were all very relevant and very relevant to me. Although I went into it in a way. I was never really attracted to it. In fact, I was living in that apartment with that roommate. It was actually a basement apartment of a house, you know, when I found his manuals of how to kill. And I realized he had, you know, bats with nails nunchucks, I went to the family that we were living with. I said, you know, this guy, Moshe, you realize what he’s got downstairs? They eventually kicked him out when they realized that it’s funny that it brought back a lot of those memories for me, I just think that I wanted to bring out that in that world at that time Kahane was very much a part of the, basically just the drinking water of that world, of that Orthodox world.
Shaul Magid:
But then it was like no one ever read it. So that was the interesting thing about Kahane. Even the Kahanists didn’t read it. Nobody really actually seriously read what he wrote. They listened to him talk, they went to his meetings, they went to rallies. He was a public person that wrote vociferously. Right? And so I basically said, okay, let me actually read the body of work.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Right. Well, that’s what’s complicated about this book is that as you say, nobody read him even probably his greatest followers, probably some of them have the books on the shelves, but people didn’t really read him. You wrote a piece for our book, for The New Jewish Canon about the Meir Kahane – Yitz Greenberg debate that took place in Riverdale in the 1980s. And what’s lost in treating that as a transcript of a text is that Kahane’s magic was as an orator. And if you actually, you can watch this on YouTube, actually, maybe we’ll put it in the show notes for people to watch the video on YouTube. You know, Greenberg is orderly, he’s got his notes in front of him, is rhetorically strong because he has an ordered argument. Kahane is gripping the podium and he’s kind of a magnificent orator to watch. The writings in some sense, don’t matter. So you have this weird attempt to basically construct an intellectual of a history of a person whose ideas were really important, but the written version of those ideas may have been lost on a lot of people. Do you think that that gets in the way of like understanding Kahane? Like you make clear that this is an intellectual biography as opposed to a kind of social biography of Kahane. Did you find it at times gaps between the experience of Kahane versus what it meant to actually kind of sort through his letters and his writings?
Shaul Magid:
Oh, definitely. I mean, he was a person that if you watch his debate with Alan Dershowitz at Harvard – it’s another kind of interesting one from 1985 – he had a certain kind of oratory power where he was able to basically people without really undermining their arguments per se. It’s really emotive, right? But I think what I tried to do in the book is to say that there actually is an intellectual project. And it’s about fear of the Cold War and communism. It’s about the counterculture. It’s about political radicalism. It’s about trying to, what he said, save the American dream for Jews in the diaspora, which I think is – one of the fascinating things about Kahane in the early years is that it really wasn’t about Israel at all. It was really about the diaspora. That’s what he says in the JDL manifesto in 1968, we’re trying to save Jewry in the diaspora it’s a diasporic project and then he eventually gives up on it and then moves to Israel.
Shaul Magid:
But even when he moves to Israel, he’s continually writing books in English to American Jews. He never gives up on America. And I think that a lot of things that he said in the sixties and seventies, and even in the eighties, it continues to resonate with a lot of American Jews. The fear of perennial Antisemitism. Antisemitism on the left is worse than Antisemitism among the right. Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism. I mean, all of those things that we’re talking about in 2021, he was talking about in 1972: the fear of intermarriage and assimilation, the challenges and the dangers of liberalism for the survival of the Jews. I mean, these are all issues that, you know, we consider around at the Hartman Institute, and we can talk about it in myriad ways. And he was talking about it at a time when nobody was really talking about it. Not in that way.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
The way you organize your book is that you essentially pick the major kind of themes of Kahanist thought as well as the kind of major issue items that govern the public discourse of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Kind of Kahane’s heyday. You have liberalism, race, communism, Zionism,
Shaul Magid:
Radicalism
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Radicalism. I didn’t on purpose leave out radicalism. We’ll come back to that. So let’s start with liberalism because this is the second place, Shaul, where I want to probe a little bit to the extent this is a personal book when it comes to the whole question of liberalism. And I’ll give you one of the quotes from your book in which you say, “I think we err, if we seek Kahane’s program as solely about Jewish militancy, although it was also about that.” This is a kind of echoing what you just said, “He sought to save the American dream for young American Jews. What I think he meant by that is that Jews could rise up and succeed while also retaining their distinct identity as Jews. And the true enemy of the Jews for him was not the black militants or white supremacists, those enemies could be dealt with rather easily. The real enemy for Kahane was Jewish liberalism.”
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Now I hear in this, a belief that the Jewish liberal project that American Jews saw as kind of essential to their thriving for a long time, Kahane thought that this was doomed to fail. That you quote Charles Liebman as feeling that this was doomed to fail. And I wonder whether you also kind of think it’s doomed to fail. Like that this attempt Jewish liberalism as the fabric of the American project just can’t hold its weight. So I’d love for you to answer on two fronts. Why does Kahane think it can’t? And why does Shaul Magid think it can’t?
Shaul Magid:
I think Kahane thought that it couldn’t because America was too attractive and that the American dream, which not only encouraged but in some sense required a certain kind of assimilation. Now, again, this is before multiculturalism, so he’s a pretty multicultural thinker. And I think that’s really important – the way in which multiculturalism changes the nature of American society. But in a pre-multicultural world, assimilation was going to basically destroy any legitimate reason to be Jewish. And by assimilation, I don’t mean disaffiliation. I mean, the way in which liberalism provides a template for living Jewishly in ways that are, as a recent colleague deemed it, thin religion. He wrote a book in 1973 about intermarriage, Why Be Jewish? Who was writing about intermarriage in 1973? Very few people were writing about it, right? He, I think that he knew that intermarriage was going to become a norm and that the stigma of intermarriage was going to disappear because that is what it means to be an American.
Shaul Magid:
It means to be able to sacrifice one’s particular identity for the American dream. Now, again, as I said, multiculturalism changes that. So I think that he just felt that the success of Jews in America was going to be ultimately their demise. And that had to do not only on questions of religious life because he wasn’t particularly religiously sensitive in that way. He wasn’t trying to – the JDL was not a kiruv institute. It wasn’t trying to make people Orthodox. It was trying to make people proud of being Jewish in a certain kind of counter-cultural way. Right? I know that you talk about counter-culture and Judaism in a particular way. And he was also talking about it in a different time.
Shaul Magid:
Now, in terms of me, I agree, but for different reasons. I think that my book “American post-Judaism” is the way I understand is a kind of radical intervention into rethinking the contours of Judaism outside of liberalism. That it really is in a certain way, a reconstruction of Judaism that is radical and counters through that thin religion that people talk about. So in some way, you know, someone like Zalman Schachter-Shalomi who’s really the centerpiece of American post-Judaism, Meir Kahane. They’re both engaged in what I would consider radical reconstructive projects in very different ways towards different ends as well.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And this actually comes through in your chapter on radicalism because you kind of talk about the way in which the left and right with their critiques become effectively unified even if there are aspects of the policies that they’re advocating for are directly opposite. Your example of Kahane’s liberation Seder and Arthur Waskow’s Freedom Seder as essentially trafficking in the same terminology. They’re doing the same project and trying to capture – I don’t think particularism is the right word because I don’t think what Waskow is doing is particularism, but it is some version of thickness, right? Of a critique of liberalism and capitalism as at the heart of this project and trying to produce something else. Is that right? Is that how this kind of lands as a critique, that that’s how it can manifest in the same way on the Jewish left as it comes out of Kahane?
Shaul Magid:
Yeah. I think that you know, very often you find that radical alternatives from opposite sides often end up sharing certain kinds of basic approaches to things. I think that one of the interesting meeting grounds of radicalism between the right and the left among Jews in the early seventies was the Soviet Jewry movement. And the way in which Kahane took it over, essentially from Jacob Birnbaum, who was interested in diplomacy, who was interested in behind-the-scenes backdoor negotiations. And Kahane basically enters in late 1969 and says, no, we basically have to engage in something that, you know, that the Weather Underground engaged in. It’s like, okay, you’re going to basically oppress Jews in the Soviet Union. We’re going to make your lives here miserable to the Russians. Right? And what ended up happening as a result of that? So the Jewry got on the front page of the New York Times, and that’s exactly what he wanted. So in a certain sense, radicalism is an intervention that doesn’t ultimately offer the solution to the problem, but it brings the problem up to the surface and into the public sphere in ways that liberalism can’t.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Well, what radicalism in that context does is it insists that one particular aspect of liberalism can’t abide, and that is what you refer to in the book as incremental politics. It basically says, no, I’m tired. I don’t want that. And whether your version of radicalism is Kahane’s radicalism or the radicals of the left is just this frustration with anybody who insists on incrementalism at the center, whether it’s about Soviet Jewry or whether it’s about Jews getting beaten up on the streets or whether it’s about, you know, the end of the occupation, right? I’m tired of incrementalism as pushing the ball down the field. I actually want to claim it. However, here’s the part of the problem liberalism isn’t just about incrementalism. Liberalism is of course about the vibrancy of the construction of the identity of the individual and the state as a mechanism to preserve that.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And I felt reading this liberalism chapter as though there was something profoundly liberal about the way you define Kahane’s project, which is if it’s about retrieving the dignity of the Jew and fortifying that identity and thickening it, that in and of itself kind of sounds like liberal terminology. And as you acknowledge yourself, like there’s something unquestionably American about what he’s trying to do. In fact, he oftentimes talked about the language of rebuilding the American Jew. Don’t be the Uncle Irving, which is the Jewish equivalent of an Uncle Tom. Isn’t that weirdly kind of its own version of a liberal project that Kahane’s engaged with.
Shaul Magid:
It is. I think I say in a place in the book that as much as Kahane was claimed to be anti-liberalism, it was liberalism that made him possible. In other words, it’s the liberal society in which he grew up that allowed him to be a radical. I think that you’re right. There are ways in which a much more nuanced understanding of liberalism – and I don’t think he really had a much more nuanced understanding of a lot of the things that he talked about, which is why he was so popular, because he’s able to boil things down in some way to a pretty simplistic, you know, bottom line, at least publicly, that makes sense to a lot of people.
Shaul Magid:
But yes, I think that that’s true. And I also want to say that generally speaking, I think the radical intervention against liberalism ultimately fails because it implodes on itself. And you could talk about that in terms of black nationalism and the Black Panthers and a number of other things. And yet it succeeds because it changes the nature of the conversation that radicalism succeeds, not because the goals of radicalism succeed, but it has an impact on what the liberal conversation will be moving forward.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I mean, that just feels always like a little bit unfair. The way that liberalism always defends itself against that radical critique, as it will say, what liberalism is capable of doing is domesticating the claims of radicalism and moving them back into an incremental space. So like, listen, if both sides, declare victory, radicalism says, I got you to move down the field a little bit. And liberalism says I got to move down the field a little bit instead of going all the way. Okay, that’s fine. But it’s kind of ironic. It’s ironic that radicalism will claim a victory if it gets people’s attention on an issue, even if it doesn’t ultimately turn into a radical political solution.
Shaul Magid:
Well, yeah, but then again, I think it’s cyclical, right? So you have, let’s say black nationalism and Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, right? Who implode in the early seventies. And now you have critical race theory and Afro-pessimism and all kinds of other things. They are the children of black nationalism. It’s another iteration of a particular radical intervention into the notion of racism in America that it sees itself in some way as a new iteration, a new layer of a kind of black nationalist intervention. Now I think that in some way you can see that in the occupy movement, you can see that in Jewish progressive movements that are happening today, where, okay, let’s say, you know, If Not Now, is another iteration of Breira in a very different environment in a very different context. So they’re always playing off each other. The question is what happens if you have liberalism without radicalism, does it actually move down the field?
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Does it get anything done? Okay. So let’s take a version of this as relates to kind of what we might call the Jewish identity industry over the last 30 or 40 years. There have been a great many educators, rabbis institutions, including our own at the Hartman Institute that is interested in thickening the identity of American Jews and not necessarily transforming it as Kahane might, but thickening its identity. Even we use the language since we’re essentially a liberal institution of creating more compelling offerings in the marketplace of ideas. It’s actually a capitalist framing of how you create a thicker identity, but the kiruv movement, the outreach movement in Orthodoxy, which really starts to grow in the eighties and especially the nineties after the 1990 Jewish population study is also interested in reclaiming some thicker, deeper expressions of Jewishness by American Jews. It believes that you know, America has been kind of a steamroller of religious, particular identity of Jews. It needs to offer alternatives. What’s the version of that, that doesn’t fall prey to Kahane’s radicalism doesn’t require his kind of racism, although you resist that term a little bit in the book. And that doesn’t at the same time to your critique simply become wishy-washy liberalism. Can any of those claims on identity that are non-radical actually make an impact?
Shaul Magid:
I think about it more on the Jewish left than the Jewish right, perhaps, with some of the ways that the Jewish progressive world has decided that its expression of thick Jewishness is through anti-Israelism. Even sometimes anti-Zionism was certainly like a harsh critique of the realities. So that in a sense, what they’re saying is yes, we are the products of liberal America. We’re the products of the Zionization of American Jewry. And now we’re just expressing that in a way that you might not like. So in other words, yes, we are the products of liberalism that have decided that the way in which to express that thickness is through critique.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
You have this line, Shaul, in the book, I thought this was like a good, it was like a one-sentence summary of Kahane, which was, you said, “Judaism of pride is the option he offers: a combination of religious nostalgia, muscular nationalism, and Jewish assertiveness.” I was like, okay, I got all three. Now let me unpack them. Religious nostalgia. We’ll come back to that a little bit. I want to ask you later on whether Kahane was sincere in the religion thing, as you understand it? Muscular nationalism. Okay. I think I understand that. And Jewish assertiveness. And yet to your point that you just made, you can take those same three pieces and talk about the contemporary Jewish left just by changing one term, which is religious nostalgia, muscular anti-nationalism, and Jewish assertiveness. And then that’s a pretty good read on what’s taking place in a lot of sectors in the Jewish left today.
Shaul Magid:
Yep. I think that’s true. And on the other side, I think you can take the religious nostalgia of Jewish nationalism or muscular or whatever I said and say, okay, that, that encapsulates a certain growing segment of modern Orthodoxy.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Do you buy it for Kahane as a real religious thinker? I mean you acknowledge, that he spent what, 13 years at the Mir Yeshiva you have like a, I think a two-page section on the influence of Musar, the Musar movement in Kahane’s thought. Part of me was like, come on, religion is the terrain in which he’s playing, but is there a real religious sincerity taking place here? Or is this, or is this something else?
Shaul Magid:
I think that Kahane is not a religious thinker in America. I think he finds religion sometime in Israel in the 1980s. And that’s when he begins to write the Harayon Hayehudi, the Jewish Idea, which is, you know, a book that I, I suggest is kind of a book of collective Mussar. I think he becomes an apocalyptic thinker. So in that sense, I think he was sincere. I think he felt that, you know, that’s what the book 40 years is about that he wrote while in prison that we’re approaching an apocalyptic end and everything is going to be destroyed. And he wouldn’t be the only, he wouldn’t be the first Jewish thinker to say that. I mean, we can go back in the tradition of Jewish apocalypticism where there were a lot of people who basically made that argument. So I think that toward the end of his life, he came to the conclusion that the Jewish state had to be destroyed because it had simply become a mirror of the American left and in a certain way, the failure of Zionism for him was that it didn’t ultimately reject liberalism.
Shaul Magid:
It absorbed it. And it was going to fall prey to the same end in different ways because it’s a Jewish society and it’s a Jewish majority and all of those things. So I think he did take it seriously, but you have to think of him as an apocalyptic thinker, not as a kind of a serious kind of traditionalist thinker.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I mean, it kind of makes sense in the sense that like he fails as a political leader because he gets banned from the Knesset, but in some larger sense, his own capitulation to thinking what he was meant to be was a noble parliamentarian – that was a capitulation. Where you see Kahane alive today is in the kind of the Hilltop youth phenomenon, which is deeply apocalyptic and it’s theological in a weird way, but it really believes that the state is fundamentally broken, not in those sectors of religious Zionism that venerate the state because Kahana was certainly not one of those folks.
Shaul Magid:
Right. So one of the interesting things about Kahane’s Zionism is that – which is why I think that a lot of the contemporary people like Itamar Ben-Gvir and people like that who identify with Kahane – is that Kahane had no interest in Rav Kook. Interestingly, he almost never mentioned him in Harayon Hayehudi, 800 pages, I think he’s mentioned a few times. And the reason is that Kahane had no patience for the kind of mystical romanticism of Rav Kook. And he had no patience for the synthesis between religion and the secular state. In a sense Kahane was much more – he was interested in power. For him, religion meant power and it meant conquest. He was a kind of neo-biblical thinker in that way. The Book of Joshua was much more important to him than the Babylonian Talmud. That’s how we saw things. So what you see with contemporary Kahanists, not talking about the Hilltop youth, because I think they are more Kahanist, is a kind of neo-Kahanism that brings together Kookian romanticism and Kahanist militarism.
Shaul Magid:
And in a certain way, it’s even more dangerous in my view because once Zvi Yehuda Kook said that the state itself is holy, you create a certain kind of very volatile mix where violence becomes holy. And you see that in one way, for example, like when Shaul Yisraeli responded to Qibya in 1953, he said, “no, nekama is holy.” Right? That this was a holy act, right? Where Ariel Sharon said about Qibya, “oh no, it was necessary.” Right? Yisraeli says, no, it wasn’t necessary. It was holy. That is in a sense, much more dangerous than Kahanism in my view.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
It’s interesting that theology, religion gets Kahane off the hook and one other place as well, which I found in the book, which is in the race section. Kahane, you know, one of the rhetorical moves that he pulls is that everyone else becomes racist. He’s not the racist, which by the way, it’s usually a good sign that you’re a racist, but whatever.
Shaul Magid:
Exactly
Yehuda Kurtzer:
But the way he does it, which is actually kind of interesting conceptually is the more that the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew is not a race position. It’s not a class position. It’s not even a behavior position. It’s a theological category then you’re kind of off the hook, right? The Jew is ontologically, theologically, a different character. And then anyone else who insists on blurring that distinction and then winds up with any measure of difference between themselves and others winds up looking like a racist.
Shaul Magid:
Yeah. I mean, he makes that argument about Abba Eban by saying that secular Zionism is racism, because what right, if you don’t believe that God gave the land to the Jewish people, then what right do you have to be here? There are other people that live here. Now it’s kind of clever, it’s a clever move.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
It’s clever.
Shaul Magid:
On the other hand, it’s also something that one can refute in all kinds of ways, but something that is, that should be a bit of an aha moment. Like, okay. Yeah. Okay. We don’t believe in God. We don’t believe that God gave the Torah to Moses. We don’t believe that God gave the land to the Jewish people. So what is the real justification for why we’re here? Like what is it rooted in other than a belief that this is ours because we believe it’s ours?
Shaul Magid:
And then the other people could say, well, this is ours because we believe it’s ours. And then you’re kind of stuck. Now, Kahane says, I just believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people. So it’s not about race. Now, he’s being disingenuous there too, for all kinds of reasons. Right? And I think race is really ultimately what undermines his career in Israel because he’s importing American racial categories into the Israeli situation, which is very, very different. And for example, the Israeli Black Panthers who he saw as being a potential partner for him against the white Ashkenazi elite, who he thought were like the American liberals, the Israeli Black Panther said like, screw you. We are actually in solidarity with the Israeli Arabs too.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
That’s right. And you’re white, Kahane.
Shaul Magid:
You’re white. Exactly. So the whole thing ended up triangulating and collapsing as it resulted in that. Because he couldn’t really reconceptualize his notion of race in Israel.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Yeah. And for what it’s worth, I mean, this is just anecdotal, but I do know some prominent Orthodox leaders in American Judaism who were close to Kahane when he was in America and disconnected from Kahane went to Israel precisely because he thought what he was doing was kind of connecting – was an obvious connection between these two stories of this fight against liberalism and this searching for particularism. But once it shows up in Israel, it’s just naked racism. Any language of Jewish pride when it actually gets attached to a nation-state, becomes as you talk about it in the book becomes some measure of supremacy.
Shaul Magid:
A lot of Orthodox rabbis and non-Orthodox rabbis were very sympathetic to Kahane’s war against intermarriage in America in the seventies. And one of the first things that he does when he gets to Israel is he tries to propose legislation for beating Jewish-Arab marriage in Israel. Right? In other words, and yet somehow people felt that was something actually very dissonant about that. In a sense, he’s being consistent. Jews shouldn’t marry non-Jews, right? Now, it’s different when you’re talking about it when Israel is a minority and when Israel is a majority.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And it’s different when you’re talking about it with the desire to voluntarily construct an identity that is counter-cultural and other versus when you’re trying to use the mechanism of a state to police and to prosecute that. I mean, I’ll give you another example to this effect. A number of years ago when Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir’s book, Goy came out. A book about kind of the intellectual history of how Jews describe and depict the other, depict the non-Jew. I got a call from someone, a kind of prominent Jewish leader. And we did a book event in New York. I got a call for a prominent Jewish leader who said it is offensive that you use the word “goy” in a marketing email. I said, well, wait a second. It’s the title of the book. They said it doesn’t matter. It is a slur against non-Jews.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And it was a little bit of a moment of realizing that this is one of the very untenable places where Jewish liberalism finds itself in which is increasingly, especially in the current political climate is really hard to talk about any version of Jewish particularism without it being depicted as racist. So Jews can get out of this by saying they are theological categories. But those of us who don’t want to describe them as theological categories are stuck kind of between a rock and hard place here. All right. Let me ask you the last big question. And this is the big one. This is the thing that frustrated me. So I’m persuaded, Shaul, that as a kind of intellectual history of American Judaism and its political challenges, I’m with you, all those categories that you listed, liberalism, race, communism, Zionism. I forgot the fifth one again.
Shaul Magid:
Radicalism, you keep on forgetting it.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
So I’m persuaded that that tells a good story, a big story of the kind of poles through which American Judaism has tried to navigate itself through the past half-century. I’m a little bit frustrated of the fact that it travels through Kahane. Now I know this is a book about Kahane, so I get it, but here’s my critique. So remember when Arendt, when she really goes after Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her critique boils down to, Eichmann’s shabbiness. He’s shabby. It’s not that he was a bureaucrat and he wasn’t making decisions. It was just like, you’re going to construct a whole theological worldview, an ideology that routes through this schlump, this loser, right? That’s what she’s basically – she’s in essence, embarrassed for the Jewish people, that the great antithesis, the enemy that they construct as Hausner says on trial, the trial, you know, “you are the encapsulation of a theological principle that runs from Pharaoh to Haman to the present.”
Yehuda Kurtzer:
She’s like you? This guy? And I got to say like, it’s not that I think that Kahane was irrelevant like some of your interlocutors. It’s not that he’s just a thug and I’m not embarrassed by him. I’m just like, not that impressed by him. I felt like he draws so much of his strength from those he is attacking those he’s criticizing and maybe Kahane is basically like the great Jewish troll of the late 20th century. So tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that Kahane really matters without just being kind of a troll in this story.
Shaul Magid:
This is the way I see him, in a way you can make the same claim as to how Gershom Scholem understands Shabbtai Tzvi. I mean, this guy – Shabbtai Tzvi was a pretty pathetic figure. He really was, right? And yet Scholem is saying that he is the quintessential heretic that influences everything after him. And arguably he becomes the repository of everything before him. He becomes for Scholem the centerpiece of Jewish history. I think for me, Kahane is a kind of American version of Shabbtai Tzvi. I think that he becomes a kind of American and Israeli heretic, political heretic, and yet, and this is true Shabbtai Tzvi, there’s something weirdly savant-like about it. He somehow was able to intuit, not because he was brilliant and not because he was learned, he had a way of putting his finger on a certain element of hypocrisy and hypocrisy exists everywhere. It exists in every movement, right?
Shaul Magid:
A certain element of hypocrisy in the American Jewish project and in Zionism, and then using that for his own opportunistic benefit. But the reason why I think he’s not like an Eichmann character is there was something strangely intuitively insightful about the way he saw the problems and the challenges of the contemporary issues of his day. And I tried to tease that out in the book. And again, you don’t necessarily have to agree with his solutions or even necessarily his larger description, but I think he had an ear for hypocrisy on his own as well. Right? You know, he had an ear for hypocrisy and I think it’s worth listening to that as we kind of move forward because it’s very easy. I think liberalism is, in particular, susceptible to this, but I think other ideologies as well to really function without quite exploring and examining its own weaknesses.
Shaul Magid:
And I think kind of helps us do that. I think radicalism helps liberalism do that if they weren’t at war with each other, they would say, you know, I think Malcolm X brought Martin Luther King to say, you know, actually there’s something to what he’s saying. And toward the end of his life, King started to actually become more sympathetic to what Malcolm was saying. I sometimes describe him and this is going to age me and maybe it’ll, you won’t even know the reference, but I think it was a cartoon called Mr. Magoo back in the sixties and Mr. Magoo was a nearsighted person. Right? And he couldn’t see where he was going, but he always ended up getting where he needed to be. And I think that Kahane had that quality where he was fumbling along. He didn’t know where he was going, but somehow he ended up putting his finger on something. And I will say, lehavdil elef havdalot, I actually saw David Hartman that way too. David Hartman was able to get up at a seminar of Hebrew University Talmud professors. And he would flail back and forth and you didn’t know what he was doing and what he was talking about. But at the end of the day, when he sat down, he put his finger on something that everybody missed. There was an ability to do that, that I think that Kahane had as well.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Well, I think the great service that you’re giving us is that those of us who don’t mourn Kahane and certainly don’t miss him, don’t have to read Kahane anymore. They can read Magid on Kahane to understand that insight. And also to be able to decide that as a person can be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Shaul Magid:
I just want to reiterate, there’s no comparison, you know, but, I think that was part of David Hartman’s greatness is somehow he was able to see something that all of the scholars seem to just gloss over.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Well, thanks very much for listening to our show and special, thanks to our guests this week, professor Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical from Princeton University Press now available. Identity/Crisis is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute. It was produced this week by David Zvi Kalman common and edited by Joelle Fredman with assistance from Miri Miller and Shalhevet Schwartz. And music provided by so-called. Transcripts of our show are now available on our website typically a week after an episode airs. To find them and to learn more about the Shalom Hartman Institute visit us online at shalomhartman.org. We really want to know what you think about the show. You can rate and review us on iTunes to help more people discover the show. And you can write to us [email protected]. You can subscribe to our show, everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week. And thanks for listening.
