Most of you will have never heard the name before, so… to leap right into a quotation from Colin Shindler from 1991:
During the week, he exuded a sexual charisma and chased “shiksas” in singles bars whilst establishing a series of right-wing front organizations to report on liberals and leftists often for the FBI. As Michael King, he co-authored a book entitled The Jewish Stake in Vietnam and was vociferous in attacking Jewish liberals for their opposition to the war. As Meir Kahane, he defined the war as a milchemet mitzva—an obligatory war and even lobbied his cheder students to enlist to fight in Vietnam.
In 1966, Kahane’s philandering lead him to proposing marriage to Estelle Donna Evans with whom he was conducting an affair. Two days before the marriage, Kahane wrote to Evans and told her that he was already married.
He still did not reveal his true identity to her. A few hours afterwards, the distraught woman threw herself off the Queensboro Bridge and died later on the operating table. She was also found to be pregnant. Kahane later told close friends that Evans had killed herself because she had terminal, cancer. In the 1980s, Kahane publicly denied that he had even had an affair with Evans.
[Source:] https://colinshindler.co.uk/on-the-death-of-meir-kahane/
He had a newborn child that same year, 1966, with the same wife who would raise four children with him in total; those four would produce 30 grandchildren by 2008.* She had married him when she was only 18 years old and would proceed to write her own biased version of his biography after his death. Tragically, or perhaps tragi-comically, the book is biased in his favor.
In the same year that he was assassinated, 1990, a book was published under the promising title, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane —From FBI Informant to Knesset Member. In this review, again, the long shadow cast by Estelle Donna Evans looms large, although the reviewer seems to be uncomfortable with judging the man's philosophy by the life he lived and the women he loved:
Friedman openly blames Kahane for the 1985 bombing in Santa Ana that killed Alex Odeh, an Arab-American community activist. “The rabbi was laying the groundwork for a terrorist underground in the United States that the FBI says carried out a string of bombings in 1985 that killed two persons, including Alex Odeh,” Friedman writes. “Kahane had long dreamed of forging a Jewish underground that would spread fear and shatter the souls of his enemies. Now just a year after his Knesset victory, he had professional assassins roaming America.”
“The False Prophet” struck me as a hit piece because Friedman appears to be driven by a visceral hatred of Kahane. The author does not try to discredit Kahane’s racist and anti-democratic ideas by showing why they are morally wrong or politically unworkable. Rather, he tries to convince us that Kahane’s ideas are bad because he is so bad--according to Friedman, he’s a loser, a nut and a very nasty fellow.
Thus, Friedman dwells on the sordid details of Kahane’s adolescent sexual experiences, his “ungracious” demeanor as a poker player, even the fact that Kahane is a stutterer. We are given a leering account of a particularly ugly incident in which Kahane apparently jilted a woman whom he picked up in a bar during one of his self-appointed undercover operations; the woman, who may have been pregnant with Kahane’s child, threw herself into the East River.
Significantly, Friedman scolds the New York Times for failing to print the story of Kahane’s dead lover back in 1971: “If the paper of record had published all it knew about Kahane, a self-righteous, Orthodox rabbi who constantly moralized about personal relationships, then perhaps both he and the JDL would have been destroyed.”
[Source:] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-29-vw-38-story.html
Ah, yes, well… I certainly have a conflict of interest here… perish the thought that anyone would ever judge my philosophy by the life I've lived and the women I've loved… my terrible habit of forcing everyone in a relationship with me to read Aristotle, etc.
Hot off the press in 2023, a new perspective is brought to this history by Shaul Magid, with a title promising some kind of detached neutrality: Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. I do not own this book and I have not read it: I'm unwilling to pay $37 (Canadian) for it and will wait for some opportunity when the price… recedes. Kahane's own books are still remarkably cheap, in paperback form, with titles that state their theses so clearly as to make the rest of the text seem redundant: Time to Go Home, 1972, and They Must Go, 1981.
Rightly or wrongly, the man's name is now attached to the (largely leaderless) Hilltop Youth phenomenon in Israel. I do not recommend reading this article from The Guardian on the subject, but… the headline alone establishes how seemingly self-evident the connection between the two has become: "Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics."
[Source:] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/20/meir-kahane-israel-kach-ben-gvir-long-dead-extremist
A turn of phrase that became famous within the vegan demimonde a decade ago —which is to say that it was well-known to a few dozen people who cared about the future of the movement— was, "Who has suffered less?"
The memory of the video in which I said this has grown distant, but I know that I said it several times, comparing the complaints about the supposed suffering vegans undergo in organizing a picnic to the Communists who had lived in caves in Laos where they had to pump in air with a hand-crank while bombs fell around them —it's possible I mentioned examples from the French Revolution, from the struggle against slavery in Haiti, or even anti-Communist rebellions.
Veganism remains a praxis in search of a principle: it has a political program, but no philosophy behind it (i.e., aside from my own philosophy, ignored by 99% of my fellow vegans, hated by 0.9% and appreciated warmly by the remainder). By contrast, in looking at Meir Kahane as a case study, we can see the enduring success of an outrageously stupid philosophy combined with an obviously immoral praxis —and yet the two legs of that political program work together, and have walked far.
Israel's Hilltop Youth do literally build houses: they do "create communities" in a palpable sense that the vast majority of vegans I've known fantasize about (and, again, this was addressed in numerous videos, including my "manifesto", On Community, now outmoded by No More Manifestos and Future of an Illusion). They build houses —and they carry guns and occasionally kill people while they're doing it.
There is not now and never has been a vegan movement as successful as the Hilltop Youth. There is not now and never has been a vegan philosophy as successful as Kahanism. Now you may tell me if vegans have lost the struggle for the future of stupidity because they weren't intelligent enough, weren't stupid enough, or both.
