A few weeks ago, I had dinner in the NYC area with a rabbi and a young rabbinic intern. We were talking about contemporary Israel and how it is run now by Kahanists (followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane) and the young rabbi-in-training asked me “who is Meir Kahane”? I was a bit shocked but afterwards I realized that I should not have been surprised, since he died (by assassination ) such a long time ago, in November 1990, in New York City.

So, who was Meir Kahane? And why is the term Kahanism, so central to understanding contemporary Israel?

Rabbi Meir Kahane was a “modern” orthodox rabbi who grew up in Brooklyn in an Orthodox Jewish family (his father and grandfather were rabbis) and became famous (or infamous) after he founded the Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn in 1968, ostensibly to protect Jews who were in danger. When I was a rabbinical student in the summer of 1969, I was asked to do some research on this young rabble rouser, when I served as a student intern for the Social Action Commission of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC, now known as the URJ, Union for Reform Judaism). I discovered that he was a very dangerous and scary person.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kahane caused a lot of trouble in NYC and other cities in America by his radical behavior via raucous demonstrations and his outrageous statements in the press. The militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), which he founded and led for several years, attracted followers with the post-Holocaust slogan “Never Again,” and sent armed patrols of young Jews into Black neighborhoods. After being imprisoned for conspiring to make bombs, Kahane moved to Israel in 1971.

In Israel, Kahane formed a political party called Kach (“This way”), which was an ultra-nationalist racist, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian, anti-peace, anti-democracy, anti-everything party. He won a seat in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in 1984, but his term ended when the Knesset banned his........

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