GETTING WOKE:

Magid clearly understands how much Kahane, who was certainly a man of the right, was himself influenced by the left of his own day. He shows how he borrowed from Black militants, the violent leftist underground, and even the left-leaning New Jews and Radical Zionists:

Kahane was no less American in his activism than Abbie Hoffman, and the JDL no less American than the Yippies or SDS. All were protest movements out to undo the establishment by testing the elasticity of the American liberal system, even as both transgressed the norms of that system in order to make their voices known.

This is no less true of Kahane's activism in Israel, as other scholars, who are not always acknowledged in Magid's footnotes, have already pointed out (my own book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement made this argument).

In Israel, Magid tells us, "The trajectory of Kahane's career moved from being a social critic of, and activist against, liberalism and what it produced in America, to a religious ideologue and apocalyptic thinker." Magid does a thorough job of elucidating Kahane's peculiarly ultranationalist, xenophobic, and violent ideology and delineating its dangers, though he also exaggerates the extent of his influence within the national-religious camp in his lifetime. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kahane was widely rejected and reviled by native Israeli Gush Emunim elites, who felt that his style of activism undermined their attempts to legitimize the settler movement. But today he does indeed have extremist disciples, including his grandson Meir Ettinger, who leads a group of radical settlers who reject secular authority and have had a more substantial impact on the Israeli far right.

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