[ad_1]
Meir Kahane in 1975. (This image is by Moshezalman, supplied under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. It is Copyright 1975 and originally appears here. It has been cropped.
When I read your article on the Rabbi Meir Kahane Honored Controversy in an email from Montclair High School, I was annoyed but not surprised by the outcry from the Jewish establishment. I had no intention of writing (partly because I know and respect one of the rabbis interviewed) but given the recent attacks on Jews here and around the world, this seems like the right time for a more honest and precise story.
Kahane started the Jewish Defense League in 1968 to protect elderly Jews and Jewish traders in New York City who were attacked and robbed. Traditional Jewish organizations were, as usual, more concerned with avoiding attention and making matters worse than protecting the victims. It had been less than 25 years since the end of WWII and the Holocaust, and when the JDL said never again, the meaning was clear.
Kahane was not a racist. He didn’t hate black people. He hated blacks who hated Jews, just as he hated whites who hated Jews, and he did not differentiate between left and right anti-Semites. He admired and worked with black people who believed in defending their people by any means necessary and proudly borrowed this slogan from Malcolm X.
It was a natural progression for Kahane to turn his attention to the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union. Most of the Jewish high school and college students, including myself, joined the student struggle for the Soviet Jewish community. We walked and gathered outside the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, but the newspapers and media paid little attention until the JDL did more and took a little semblance of it. retaliation. Perhaps if the Jewish leaders who called on FDR to bomb the train tracks on which Jews were transported to their deaths at Auschwitz had done more, Roosevelt would not have said no.
Moving to Israel and founding the Kach Party was another natural progression for Kahane. Some called him a racist for proposing to deprive non-Jews of Israeli citizenship (but not of their individual rights) and to induce them to leave the country, but the reasoning behind the proposal was not racism. Kahane identified a problem that no one else wanted to solve: if at some point non-Jewish citizens outnumbered Jewish citizens, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. While its solution may offend the sensibilities of those living in an American democracy, it is consistent with how each Islamic state in the Middle East preserves its identity.
We live in an age where some label those who disagree with them as racists so that they can reject them, rather than face the possible insufficiency of their own positions. Reject Kahane as a racist and terrorist rather than examining his ideas and tactics in the context of a world that condemns Jews for retaliating instead of silently walking through gas chambers, and in the context of a community and of a Jewish leadership more concerned with appearances than Jews with lives, says more about those who fired him than about Kahane.
Howard Myerowitz Harrison
Editor’s Note: The Jewish Defense League has been classified as a far-right terrorist group by the FBI since 2001 and is named as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Kach party was declared a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union, and was excluded from the Knesset in 1988. Over the decades, members of the JDL have been indicted or sentenced repeatedly in states. United for acts of violence, including bombings, shootings and arson against Arab and Soviet individuals and property, including the Soviet mission. Meir Kahane in 1975 was convicted of violating his probation following a 1971 guilty plea for conspiracy to make a bomb; he was accused of plots to smuggle weapons from Israel to Europe and of urging JDL members to bomb the Iraqi embassy and kidnap Soviet diplomats.
The Opinion section of Montclair Local is an open forum for civil discussion in which we invite readers to discuss city affairs, articles published in Montclair or previously published letters. The opinions expressed and published in this section are solely those of the authors and do not represent the opinions of Montclair Local.
Letters to the Editor: To submit a letter to the editor, email [email protected] or send letters to “Letters to the Editor”, 309 Orange Road, Montclair, NJ, 07042 (l e-mail is preferable). Submissions should include the author’s name, address and phone number for verification. Only the name and city of residence of the author will be published. Montclair Local does not publish anonymous opinion pieces.
Letters should not exceed 500 words and must be received by 5:00 p.m. on Monday to be eligible for potential publication in this week’s Thursday print issue. Letters can be edited by Montclair Local for grammar and style. While our goal is to publish most letters we receive, Montclair Local reserves the right to refuse publication of a letter for any reason, including, but not limited to, concerns about unproven or defamatory statements, inappropriate language, subject matter far removed from the particular interests of Montclair Residents, or available space.
Town Square: Montclair Local also accepts longer opinion essays from residents aimed at generating discussion on specific community topics, under our “TownSquare” banner. Town Square essays should not exceed 750 words and papers should be submitted to [email protected] at least seven days prior to publication.
[ad_2]
picture credit