Meir Kahane

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American-born rabbi, founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach party, and member of the Knesset 1984–1988

Meir Kahane

Born 1 August 1932 Brooklyn, New York
Died 5 November 1990 Marriott East Side Hotel, Manhattan, New York
Residence Mattersdorf, Jerusalem (until 1990)
Occupation Rabbi, journalist, political activist, politician
Known for Founding the Jewish Defense League (1968) and Kach; member of the Knesset 1984–1988
Parents Charles and Sonia Kahane
Spouse(s) Libby Kahane
Children Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane and others
Education Mir Yeshiva, Brooklyn; Brooklyn College; law degree, New York

Meir Kahane (born Martin David Kahane; 1 August 1932 – 5 November 1990) was an American-born Orthodox rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in New York in 1968 and, after moving to Israel in 1971, the anti-Arab movement and party Kach.[1] He sat in the Knesset for Kach from 1984 until 1988, when the Central Elections Committee barred his list as racist and anti-democratic and the Supreme Court of Israel upheld the ban.[2][3]

Kahane was shot dead in Manhattan on 5 November 1990 by El Sayyid Nosair. Nosair was acquitted of murder at a 1991 state trial but was convicted in federal court in 1995 of murder in furtherance of a racketeering enterprise for the killing.[4] After his death the movement split into Kach and Kahane Chai, and the Israeli government declared both terrorist organisations in March 1994, after the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre by the Kach activist Baruch Goldstein.[5] His ideas are carried on by successor groups including Otzma Yehudit, whose leader Itamar Ben-Gvir has been described as "a follower of Meir Kahane".[6]

Early life and education

Kahane was born Martin David Kahane on 1 August 1932 and grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the son of Charles and Sonia Kahane; he later used his Hebrew name, Meir.[7] His father, a rabbi, was born in Safed in 1905.[8] Friedman writes that Kahane was first arrested at the age of 15, in 1947, after he and friends from Betar, the Revisionist youth movement, pelted the car of the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin with eggs and tomatoes at a New York pier.[9]

The historian Shaul Magid writes that Kahane spent thirteen years at the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn, where Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz ordained him and later officiated at his wedding.[10] Accounts of his secular education differ. According to the journalist Robert I. Friedman, he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1954 and in 1957 received a law degree from New York Law School and a master's degree in international affairs from New York University, but failed the bar examination.[11] Magid gives his law degree as from the NYU School of Law and says he "repeatedly failed to pass the bar exam". Magid adds that Kahane worked as a sportswriter, as a congregational rabbi in Queens and Brooklyn in the 1950s, and as a journalist for the Jewish Press, a Brooklyn weekly.[12]

Michael King and the FBI

Friedman writes that in 1963 Kahane began a research and intelligence-gathering business with his childhood friend and fellow Betar member Joseph Churba, using the name "Michael King".[13] Kahane told Friedman that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had asked him and Churba that year to infiltrate the John Birch Society to find the source of its funds, and that he did so under the King alias.[14] In 1965 the pair launched the July Fourth Movement in support of the war in Vietnam,[15] and in 1967 they published The Jewish Stake in Vietnam under the King name.[12] Earlier, in a Jewish Press essay of 22 May 1964, "To Save Soviet Jewry", Kahane had blamed the United States and the complacency of American Jews for the plight of Soviet Jewry. Magid says he rarely wrote about it again for the next five years.[16]

Accounts of Kahane's congressional testimony differ. In the Introduction to his 2021 book, Magid writes that in 1967 Kahane "testified to Congress about Soviet Jewry".[12] In the book's chapter on communism, and in a 2023 article, Magid dates Kahane's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, on communism and Soviet antisemitism, to 9 June 1968, a month after the JDL was founded. Kahane told the committee he had made "a 15-year study of communism and Soviet anti-Semitism"; Magid writes that "we have no evidence of such a study".[17][18]

Jewish Defense League

Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in May 1968. Magid links its founding to the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville school strike in New York and to what Kahane called "black anti-Semitism". Its early patrols protected elderly Jews in what the press called "frontier" neighbourhoods.[19][20] Friedman says the JDL was conceived at the Young Israel of Laurelton, Queens, with the lawyer Bertram Zweibon, and held its first demonstration on 5 August 1968 at New York University.[21]

According to Magid, late in December 1969 Kahane walked into the JDL office at 156 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and announced that the League would now concentrate on Soviet Jewry. On 29 December JDL members struck the New York offices of the Soviet press agency TASS, the tour operator Intourist and the airline Aeroflot. On 30 December they broke through police barriers to protest outside the Soviet Mission in Manhattan.[22][23] Kahane also ran a summer camp, Camp Jedel, where campers learned martial arts and how to shoot guns.[24] Magid writes that the JDL's activities included arms smuggling across state lines and the illegal transport of explosives materials, and that by 1975 it had "largely collapsed under local and federal indictments".[1]

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was among the Orthodox leaders who publicly opposed the JDL's Soviet Jewry demonstrations. In his own history of the JDL, Kahane quoted the Rebbe as saying that "these demonstrations have tragic implications to the Jews" and replied that the Rebbe never produced "one name of a Jew who was alleged to have suffered because of JDL activities".[25] A 1971 letter in the Jewish Press from the rabbi of the Young Israel of Laurelton, Eliahu Rominek, urged the JDL to "repent" and quoted the Rebbe: "Not one Jew has been saved or helped because of these demonstrations."[26] Magid writes that Schneerson, who had directed resources to aid Soviet Jews "even in the 1950s", "strongly opposed Kahane's program, rejecting even non-violent protest". He favoured clandestine work, and he lobbied unsuccessfully to cancel the "Solidarity Sunday" rally for Soviet Jewry in Washington in December 1987.[27] In his 2021 book Magid compares Kahane's hostility to science as a worldview, as distinct from its practical uses, with that of Schneerson.[28] Magid has said that Kahane lived briefly in Crown Heights and that some scholars regard the Crown Heights "Maccabees" street patrol of the mid-1960s as the "germ cell" of the JDL idea.[6] The relationship is covered in more detail at Chabad and Kahanism.

Convictions in the United States

Magid writes that a jury convicted Kahane of disorderly conduct over the December 1969 protest at the Soviet Mission and threw out a charge of resisting arrest; the verdict came in February 1971.[29] On 9 July 1971 Kahane pleaded guilty in federal court to manufacturing firebombs. Judge Jack B. Weinstein sentenced him to four years' probation, and as part of the plea bargain he swore to have nothing more to do with weapons or explosives. Friedman says an FBI warning about future prosecutions was one reason he moved to Israel in September 1971.[30] Magid describes the 1971 outcome as a five-year suspended sentence and a $5,000 fine.[24][31] In February 1975 the court revoked his probation, citing letters he had written from Israel directing associates in America to attack Soviet and Arab diplomats. He was sentenced to one year, serving eight months in a Manhattan halfway house and the rest at the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.[32]

Israel and Kach

Kahane settled in Israel in September 1971.[1] In August 1972 he distributed leaflets in occupied Hebron announcing a mock trial of its residents for the 1929 massacre of Jews there.[33] In 1973 Israeli prosecutors charged him with sedition over letters urging Israeli Arabs to emigrate. In June that year he was arrested over intercepted letters ordering violent attacks in the United States, and he was later convicted and given a suspended sentence.[34] Magid writes that Kahane was arrested more than sixty times in Israel and convicted of numerous offences, including incitement to violence.[1]

Magid writes that one of Kahane's first proposals in Israel was a civil-law ban on marriage, and even dating, between Jews and Arabs.[35] By 1974 he was proposing "a planned and well-funded emigration of Arabs from Israel" through an "Emigration Fund for Peace", which he then described as voluntary.[36] A full-page advertisement he placed in Maariv in May 1981 called for a law against the "abomination of assimilation and communion with goyim" and a mandatory prison sentence for any Arab who had sexual relations with a Jewish woman. Magid adds that Kahane later declared he would strip Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and work to expel those who refused to give it up, and that he submitted such a bill to the Knesset in late 1985.[37] In They Must Go (1981) he wrote: "Tragedy will be ours if we do not move the Arabs out."[38]

He first stood for the Knesset in 1973 under the JDL banner and won 12,811 votes (0.81 per cent), short of the 1 per cent threshold.[39] In a letter of 3 July 1974 he told the JDL board that he would form a new group in Israel called Kach, "Hebrew for 'thus' or 'this is the way'".[40] For the 1977 campaign Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook publicly endorsed him. During that campaign Kahane and armed followers stormed the office of Bassam Shaka, the mayor of occupied Nablus, and Kach won 4,396 votes.[41] Kach's 1981 list again failed.[2] Kahane bought an apartment in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron in the occupied West Bank.[42]

In May 1980 Kahane and an associate, Baruch Green, were placed in administrative detention on Defence Ministry orders for allegedly planning action against Arabs in the West Bank. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that this was the first use of detention without trial against Jewish citizens of Israel; a Jerusalem district court upheld the order but cut the term from six months to three.[43] The historian Colin Shindler writes that Kahane called Menachem Begin "a traitor" after Camp David, that Kach called for a show trial of the mayor of Hebron, and that its followers threatened mass suicide during the evacuation of Yamit in Sinai.[44]

Knesset member, 1984–1988

The Central Elections Committee disqualified Kach before the 1984 election, but the Supreme Court overturned the decision.[2] In the election of 23 July 1984 Kach won one seat with 25,907 votes (1.2 per cent).[45] Friedman puts the 1984 result at 1.2 per cent after three failed attempts. Magid says there were two failed attempts, but the official results show lists in 1973, 1977 and 1981.[46][37][2] Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said he would not admit Kach to a Likud-led coalition. On 25 December 1984 the Knesset voted to restrict Kahane's parliamentary privileges.[37][47] Shindler cites a 1985 Van Leer Institute poll indicating that Kahane's ideas attracted more than 40 per cent of Israeli youth. Magid cites a Modi'in Ezrachi poll a year after the election suggesting that Kach would then have won eleven seats.[44][47]

In 1985 the Knesset added section 7A to the Basic Law: The Knesset, allowing a list to be barred if its aims or actions included "incitement to racism".[3] In a Knesset speech of 23 December 1985 Kahane defended the Lubavitcher Rebbe, "one of the greatest rabbis and leaders of Israel, the Admor of Chabad, of Lubavitch". He said the Land of Israel "belongs to the Admor of Chabad", not to the Shinui member Zeidan Atashi, who had criticised the Rebbe.[48]

On 5 October 1988 the Central Elections Committee disqualified Kach from the 1 November 1988 election under section 7A. On 18 October a five-judge Supreme Court panel presided over by Meir Shamgar dismissed Kahane's appeal. It found that Kach wished to deprive part of the citizenry, defined by national origin, of the right to vote and stand for office, and that its objectives and conduct were "clearly racist", including calls for that group's "humiliation in ways very similar to the terrible experiences of the Jewish nation".[3] Shamir said "democracy must defend itself".[49] Friedman attributes the ban to an anti-racism law passed in August 1986. Magid writes that Kach was "labeled a racist party" in 1986 and Kahane removed from the Knesset that year. The court record shows that the 1988 disqualification was made under section 7A and that Kahane served his full term.[50][1][3]

Assassination

On 5 November 1990, after a speech at the Marriott East Side Hotel in Manhattan urging American Jews to move to Israel, Kahane was shot in the neck and chest. The gunman, El Sayyid Nosair, also shot 70-year-old Irving Franklin and the postal police officer Carlos Acosta, who shot and detained him.[4] At a state trial in 1991 Nosair was acquitted of second-degree murder but convicted on weapons charges and sentenced to 7⅓ to 22 years.[51] In the federal seditious conspiracy trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others (January to October 1995), Nosair was convicted of the murder of Kahane in furtherance of a racketeering enterprise. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the Second Circuit affirmed the convictions in 1999.[4]

Kahane was buried in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul cemetery on 7 November 1990. The JTA said tens of thousands attended; the Los Angeles Times gave a police estimate of 15,000.[52][53] Mourners attacked Palestinians and journalists along the route. Police reported four Palestinians and two officers injured and 13 arrests. The funeral organisers prevented the science minister, Yuval Ne'eman, from representing the government.[53][52]

Legacy

After Kahane's death, his son Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane lost the succession struggle for Kach and founded Kahane Chai ("Kahane Lives").[54] Both lists were disqualified in 1992.[2] Kach activist Baruch Goldstein, who had been Kahane's campaign manager in 1984 and whose wedding Kahane had officiated, killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in occupied Hebron on 25 February 1994.[55] Magid writes that Goldstein "viewed himself as part of his circle of disciples", and that his grave in Kiryat Arba lies next to Kahane Park.[56] On 13 March 1994 the Israeli cabinet declared Kach and Kahane Chai terrorist organisations.[5] Binyamin Kahane and his wife Talia were killed by Palestinian gunmen on 31 December 2000 on the way to Kfar Tapuach, a settlement in the occupied West Bank.[54]

Shindler writes that Kahane Chai inspired the Hilltop Youth, while followers such as Baruch Marzel and Michael Ben-Ari took the parliamentary road. Ben-Ari entered the Knesset for the National Union in 2009.[57] Otzma Yehudit traces its roots to Marzel's Jewish National Front. Its ministers, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, joined the government formed in December 2022, resigned in January 2025 and returned two months later.[58] Magid writes that many of Kahane's ideas "continue to resonate today, even in more conventional or mainstream parts of American and Israeli Jewry".[1] He traces a "neo-Kahanism" among settler youth, including the "price-taggers", the "hilltop youth", the Lahava movement, the Jewish Leadership movement and the Derech Chaim movement of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, whose theology he calls "Chabad-inflected".[59]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Shaul Magid, Introduction Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021, ISBN 978-0-691-17933-9, p. 2, accessed 10 November 2026.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Israel Democracy Institute, Kach Party Israel Democracy Institute, accessed 10 November 2026.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Supreme Court of Israel, Neiman v. Chairman of the Central Election Committee for the 12th Knesset, EA 1/88 Versa: Opinions of the Supreme Court of Israel (English translation), judgment of 18 October 1988, accessed 10 November 2026.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, United States v. Rahman, 189 F.3d 88 (2d Cir. 1999) CourtListener, decided 16 August 1999, accessed 10 November 2026.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Gad Yaacobi, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, Letter dated 14 March 1994 transmitting the Israeli Government decision on Kach and Kahane Chai United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, 14 March 1994, accessed 10 November 2026.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Arielle Angel, Shaul Magid and Hadas Binyamini, Chabad's Extremist Turn Jewish Currents, 15 May 2025, accessed 10 November 2026.
  7. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990, ISBN 1-55652-078-6, p. 10.
  8. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 12.
  9. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 9.
  10. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, Introduction, pp. 3–4.
  11. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 46.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, Introduction, p. 4.
  13. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 57.
  14. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 61–62.
  15. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 68.
  16. ↑ Shaul Magid, Communism, Zionism, Arabism, and America: Meir Kahane on Soviet Jewry in a Global Countercultural Register American Religion, vol. 4, no. 2, Spring 2023, pp. 75–100, at p. 85.
  17. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, pp. 114–115.
  18. ↑ Shaul Magid, "Communism, Zionism, Arabism, and America", American Religion, 2023, p. 87.
  19. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, Introduction, p. 1.
  20. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 78.
  21. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 84, 90–91.
  22. ↑ Shaul Magid, "Communism, Zionism, Arabism, and America", American Religion, 2023, p. 86.
  23. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, pp. 115–116.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, Introduction, p. 5.
  25. ↑ Meir Kahane, The Story of the Jewish Defense League, Chilton Book Company, 1975; 2nd edn, Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, 2000, ISBN 965-7044-04-9, pp. 30–31.
  26. ↑ Shlomo M. Russ, The "Zionist Hooligans": The Jewish Defense League, PhD thesis, City University of New York, 1981, p. 982, citing the Jewish Press, 8 January 1971.
  27. ↑ Shaul Magid, "Communism, Zionism, Arabism, and America", American Religion, 2023, p. 84.
  28. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 171.
  29. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, pp. 116–117.
  30. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 123–124, 129–130.
  31. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 133.
  32. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 179–180.
  33. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 149.
  34. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 153, 157.
  35. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 147.
  36. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, pp. 136, 146.
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 37.2 Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 77.
  38. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, pp. 152–153.
  39. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 167.
  40. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 175–176.
  41. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 189–190.
  42. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 173.
  43. ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Court Upholds Administrative Arrest of Kahane and an Associate JTA Daily Bulletin, 21 May 1980, accessed 10 November 2026.
  44. ↑ 44.0 44.1 Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 331.
  45. ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Final Election Results for the Eleventh Knesset JTA Daily Bulletin, 13 August 1984, accessed 10 November 2026.
  46. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, p. 209.
  47. ↑ 47.0 47.1 Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 143.
  48. ↑ Knesset, Divrei HaKnesset, 11th Knesset, 2nd session, 153rd sitting Divrei HaKnesset (in Hebrew), 23 December 1985, accessed 10 November 2026.
  49. ↑ Daniel Williams, High Court Bars Kahane Party From Israeli Vote Los Angeles Times, 19 October 1988, accessed 10 November 2026.
  50. ↑ Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet, 1990, pp. 257–258.
  51. ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Man Acquitted of Killing Kahane Gets Life Sentence for Terror Plot JTA Daily Bulletin, 21 January 1996, accessed 10 November 2026.
  52. ↑ 52.0 52.1 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Riots Accompany Kahane Funeral As Arabs and Media Are Set Upon JTA Daily Bulletin, 8 November 1990, accessed 10 November 2026.
  53. ↑ 53.0 53.1 Daniel Williams, Kahane Mourners Riot Along Funeral Route Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1990, accessed 10 November 2026.
  54. ↑ 54.0 54.1 Lawrence Joffe, Binyamin Kahane The Guardian, 9 January 2001, accessed 10 November 2026.
  55. ↑ Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 194–196.
  56. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 150.
  57. ↑ Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right, 2015, pp. 335–336.
  58. ↑ Israel Democracy Institute, Otzma Yehudit Israel Democracy Institute, accessed 10 November 2026.
  59. ↑ Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane, 2021, p. 195, and p. 234 n. 86.
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