It’s hard, painful work. Younger people in particular are sensing that the paradigms they’ve inherited (two-state solution, reeducation, innocent civilians, etc.) are, if not fundamentally flawed, then simply unworkable in reality. What these people like is seeing a voice and model that looks and sounds different from the tired and clearly ineffective shit they’ve been hearing from the American Jewish establishment their whole lives.

Instead of listening to these people, challenging paradigms and doing the hard work of conceptualizing new ones—and the even harder work of admitting where they went wrong—Jewish liberals, as they’re now apparently programmed to do, are missing an opportunity to offer any vision or inspiration. As with the current Democratic Party in general, the siren songs of condescension and hysteria and tone-policing are stronger than any other impulse. When social media influencer Lizzy Savetsky shared a video of Kahane with her nearly half a million followers, the group Zioness felt moved to enter the fray, calling Kahane “a monster” and labeling anyone tolerating his views—a group that presumably includes Savetsky, a former cast member of the Real Housewives of New York who has a fashion line making Hanukkah pajamas for toddlers—“a terror supporter.”

By summoning Kahane’s ghost, nice Jews brutally robbed by the post-Oct. 7 reality can tell themselves yet again that they are liberals in good standing, that their old ideas still apply, that they’re nothing like the bearded throngs who either never attended the University of Pennsylvania or who have no desire to reclaim it. Kahane becomes an ultimate ideological off-ramp: Instead of sobering up to the fact that no amount of squawking about reconciliation is going to bring peace, these good Jews can return to their previously scheduled programming, hop on their soap box, and full-throatedly defend progressive values against a bogeyman that they themselves mostly conjured.

Or, as the writer Karol Markowicz astutely observed: “Liberal Jews are back to their handwringing after some time of quiet after they realized their entire worldview was a dumpster fire.” The only real power liberalism is interested in these days, she concluded, is the power to get other liberals back in line.

And the ghost of Kahane is as fine an enforcer as there ever was. For one thing, the man has been dead for 35 years. For another, unlike Trump or Netanyahu, say, he has very few disciples genuinely committed to furthering his aims. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, he appears, in full military garb, merely to demand revenge and terrify all who observe him.

The threat of a Kahanist revival has been a godsend particularly for American political operatives eager to reshape Israeli politics in the image of the Democratic Party. Take Biden’s former ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, who two years ago took the uncommon step of using his office to intervene in Israel’s domestic political affairs. When criticized, Nides clapped back. “I really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business,” he quipped. His boss, of course, was all too keen to live up to the promise, treating Israeli citizens he had found politically undesirable to a series of stern and rarely used sanctions. And Democratic Party dark money groups—like the Tides Foundation, funded by Peter Buffett and other progressive billionaires—direct a fortune to Israeli NGOs dedicated to ousting Netanyahu and replacing him with a candidate more aligned with the American left. All of these examples have one thing in common: They were all explained away as part of a benevolent effort to save the soul of Israeli democracy and rescue the Jewish nation from the clutches of extremists who threaten to drag it to the gutter of racism and hate.

Now this mechanism is moving stateside, where the ghost of Kahane has been called in to enable people to avoid any responsibility for their own actions and beliefs. What is it that those ululating about Kahane’s resurgence propose we do with the savages next door? How do they believe we ought to handle a population that, by any metric at our disposal, can’t help but slaughter Jews? Leave Gazans in the rubble of their booby-trapped homes and in the care of Hamas for next two decades as the entire Gaza Strip is rebuilt—or not? Airlift Israel’s Jewish population to London, France or the Congo—where they are sure to be even more welcome than they are in the Jewish state? Institute an official pledge to ensure protective treatment for American Jews who remain stubbornly attached to the prestige of decaying Ivy League schools, in order to exempt them from association with evil Zionist Jews? Appoint Chuck Schumer king of Judea? Give nukes to Iran? I’m all ears.

But instead of proposing anything productive about Israelis or Palestinians, all we get from these folks is narcissistic obsession with their own identity. Are these questions hard? They are. It’s much easier to brush back one’s hair, look dreamily to the mid-distance, and proclaim that one will never—never!—support such monsters like Rabbi Meir Kahane.

But this won’t ever lead to the inception of urgently needed new paradigms, hard but necessary steps, or real and honest reckonings. All they’re good for is allowing people to tell themselves that no matter how far they’ve come since Oct. 7, 2023, they are not—and never, ever, ever will be—the worst thing one could ever turn into, which is a right-winger. Which couldn’t have come at a better time: Here’s the ghost of Kahane, being conjured to give those American and Israeli Jews who still want to find themselves welcomed in polite society an out—under duress, but still—to oppose Trump’s plan. Empty Gaza of Gazans? Why, that’s a Kahanist idea, and anyone who supports it is a Kahanist, or a racist, right-wing thug.

Ironically, in his lifetime, Kahane never even got far with the right, which dismissed him as an excitable and not particularly disciplined provocateur. Now, he has once again become what he had always truly been: the left’s Frankenstein’s monster, a creature of their hubris and an instrument they can use to police everyone else. And just like in that old classic, the real threat is never the oaf stumbling across the countryside and scaring the young and the feebleminded, but the arrogant and the educated who adhere to a moral code of their own making—the consequences, and the lives of humans half a world away, be damned.