{"id":119638,"date":"2025-03-06T17:05:40","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T15:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=119638"},"modified":"2025-03-06T12:56:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T10:56:29","slug":"06-05-111","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=119638","title":{"rendered":"Kahane Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Kahane Lives<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Liel Leibovitz<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The controversial firebrand rabbi is experiencing a revival\u2014but for whose benefit?<\/strong>
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Photo illustration: Tablet Magazine<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Aspecter is haunting Judaism\u2019s genteel corners these days: the specter of Meir Kahane.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Everywhere you turn, the rabbi and Israeli politician, who was assassinated by a jihadist in New York in 1990, is looming large.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAs Kahanism forces its way into mainstream discourse,\u201d thundered one young progressive on social media, \u201cit\u2019s incumbent upon voices in the Jewish space to call it out and to pressure Jewish organizations to not pedestalize those who invoke his name with favor.\u201d Another pundit, a rabbi and Jewish communal leader, warned in a fiery and widely shared post against \u201cmainstreaming Kahanist maximalism.\u201d On Instagram, a group of Jewish content creators\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0to express their \u201cshock\u201d at the \u201csurge in Kahanist rhetoric.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The list goes on. In the feverish imaginations of our self-appointed best and brightest, the ghost of Kahane now howls in the bones of Jews from Peoria to Petach Tikvah, threatening to turn even the most formerly reasonable Zionist into a bearded beastie all too keen on finding and lynching the first Arab who ambles by.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019ve some very good news: the rumors of Kahane\u2019s rebirth are greatly exaggerated. For the overwhelming majority of Jews, the late rabbi remains more or less what he had always been: a historical footnote, a charismatic and problematic leader who was right about some things and very, very wrong about a lot of others.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kahane has once again become what he had always truly been: the left\u2019s Frankenstein\u2019s monster, a creature of their hubris and an instrument they can use to police everyone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Poll Jews anywhere about Kahane\u2019s desire to abolish Israel\u2019s electoral system and replace it with a theocracy, and you\u2019ll find no more than a handful of takers. Ask who\u2019s in favor of outlawing sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, and you\u2019ll see very few hands go up. And nearly no one, Baruch HaShem, walks around these days referring to secular Jews as Hellenizers and suggesting that, should the opportunity arise, slaughtering a handful of them would do the nation a bit of good. These vile delusions excite none but a gaggle of rabid lunatics, which, I\u2019m happy to report, was the case even when Kahane himself was around to spew them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the late rabbi, like a broken clock that tells the right time precisely twice each day, was right about one thing. The Palestinians, he correctly observed, were a cluster of clans, not a nation with a shared history, a shared identity, and shared aspirations for an eventual peaceful coexistence with Israel. Their aim is the eradication of the Jewish state next door, which is why all attempts at replacing the rifle with the olive branch end in tragedy. To solve the problem, Kahane advised, one would need to separate the Palestinians from the Jews, with the former joining their brethren in any of the region\u2019s many Arab states.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Considered with October 7 and its aftermath firmly in mind, there is nothing particularly jarring about this insistence on separation. As President Donald Trump argues, we need a new paradigm if we are to secure the safety and wellbeing of Israelis and Palestinians moving forward. Keep Hamas in power, or hand over the reins to the only slightly less genocidal PLO, and you\u2019ll have another Oct. 7 (and its Israeli reply) next week, next month, next year. This is why the idea of forced relocation is gaining traction. The vast majority of those who support it see it not as an invitation to Kahanism and with it some spree of wanton killing and rampant racism, but as a difficult yet necessary solution designed to guarantee no more bloodshed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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None of this is very hard to understand. And yet, many are running around warning about the second coming of Kahane. Why? That\u2019s a much more interesting\u2014and much more urgent\u2014question.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Consider, for a moment, the road traveled by many American Jews these past 15 months. One day, they were members in good standing of a virtuous, unimpeachable community of people who attended the finest schools, subscribed to the finest publications, and held the finest opinions. The next, they woke up not only to thousands of slaughtered innocents but also to the realization that the schools they attended were hotbeds of bigotry, not the free and unfettered exchange of ideas; that the publications they read were propaganda, telling always and only one story; that the opinions they held bore little resemblance to the gruesome reality unfurling before their very eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Having had the opportunity myself, before Oct. 7, to challenge everything I once believed, I can report that the process of asking inconvenient questions can be daunting. Pursue it with neither fear nor favor, and you\u2019ll end up a bit dazed, asking yourself if it\u2019s really you saying all these things you\u2019d once considered anathema. You\u2019ll witness friends taking their leave and social circles contracting. And you\u2019ll understand why that great Jewish playwright hit it right on the head when he stated that some people just can\u2019t handle the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s hard, painful work. Younger people in particular are sensing that the paradigms they\u2019ve 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\u2019ve been hearing from the American Jewish establishment their whole lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead of listening to these people, challenging paradigms and doing the hard work of conceptualizing new ones\u2014and the even harder work of admitting where they went wrong\u2014Jewish liberals, as they\u2019re 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\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0of Kahane with her nearly half a million followers, the group Zioness felt moved to enter the fray, calling Kahane \u201ca monster\u201d and labeling anyone tolerating his views\u2014a 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\u2014\u201ca terror supporter.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By summoning Kahane\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Or, as the writer Karol Markowicz astutely\u00a0observed<\/a>: \u201cLiberal Jews are back to their handwringing after some time of quiet after they realized their entire worldview was a dumpster fire.\u201d The only real power liberalism is interested in these days, she concluded, is the power to get other liberals back in line.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s father, he appears, in full military garb, merely to demand revenge and terrify all who observe him.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s former ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, who two years ago took the uncommon step of using his office to\u00a0intervene<\/a>\u00a0in Israel\u2019s domestic political affairs. When criticized, Nides clapped back. \u201cI really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business,\u201d 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\u2014like the Tides Foundation, funded by Peter Buffett and other progressive billionaires\u2014direct<\/a>\u00a0a 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2014or not? Airlift Israel\u2019s Jewish population to London, France or the Congo\u2014where 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?\u00a0I\u2019m all ears.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s much easier to brush back one\u2019s hair, look dreamily to the mid-distance, and proclaim that one will never\u2014never!\u2014support such monsters like Rabbi Meir Kahane.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But this won\u2019t ever lead to the inception of urgently needed new paradigms, hard but necessary steps, or real and honest reckonings. All they\u2019re good for is allowing people to tell themselves that no matter how far they\u2019ve come since Oct. 7, 2023, they are not\u2014and never, ever, ever will be\u2014the worst thing one could ever turn into, which is a right-winger. Which couldn\u2019t have come at a better time: Here\u2019s 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\u2014under duress, but still\u2014to oppose Trump\u2019s plan. Empty Gaza of Gazans? Why, that\u2019s a\u00a0Kahanist\u00a0<\/em>idea, and anyone who supports it is a\u00a0Kahanist<\/em>, or a racist, right-wing thug.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s Frankenstein\u2019s 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\u2014the consequences, and the lives of humans half a world away, be damned.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Liel Leibovitz<\/strong> is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and the host of its weekly podcast\u00a0Rootless<\/a>\u00a0and its daily Talmud podcast\u00a0Take One<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Kahane Lives Liel Leibovitz The controversial firebrand rabbi is experiencing a revival\u2014but for whose benefit? . Photo illustration: Tablet Magazine Aspecter is haunting Judaism\u2019s genteel corners these days: the specter of Meir Kahane. Everywhere you turn, the rabbi and Israeli politician, who was assassinated by a jihadist in New York in 1990, is looming large. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119638"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119682,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119638\/revisions\/119682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}