Yossi Klein Halevi. Photo by Ilir Bajraktari
In 1972, when Yossi Klein Halevi began writing a book that 23 years later would become his Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, he was just 19 and allied with the extremist right wing of the Free Soviet Jewry movement.
As a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane (assassinated in 1990) and a member of Kahanes Jewish Defense League (JDL), Halevi used his journalistic ability to clarify world events on behalf of the JDL. At the time, he still lived in his native New York City, so his role was to filter news about Israel and Jews through a prism largely shaped by the fear of another Holocaust, in which Jews and Israelis felt themselves unwelcome neighbors in a hostile gentile world.
The young Halevi likely never could have imagined that one day he would write a rebuke of Jewish extremism, saying it preaches ideas that are anathema to Judaism.
Halevis memoir was first published in 1995, almost to the day of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by the Jewish extremist Yigal Amir. Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist chronicles Halevis evolution from his teens into his late 20s. His other books, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden and, most recently, the National Jewish Book award-winning Like Dreamers, have become known not for extremism, but rather for thoughtful moderation steeped in the authors love for Judaism and Israel.
The re-release of Memoirs in October could not have come at a more appropriate time, as a new brand of Palestinian terrorism of cars and knives shakes Israel, and vandalism, assaults and the murder of an Arab teen by three Jewish extremists all have made Jerusalem feel in recent months like a city waiting to explode into a war of neighbor versus neighbor.
On Nov. 29, extremist Jews lit a Jerusalem bilingual Jewish-Arab school on fire and spray-painted inciteful anti-Arab messages, including one that read, Kahane was right.
In a Nov. 19 interview with the Jewish Journal, one day after a brutal terrorist attack at a Har Nof synagogue just outside Jerusalem, where four Jews were murdered during morning prayers, Halevi described the feeling among Israelis as, Anything can happen at any moment.
What follows is an edited transcript of the interview:
Jewish Journal: There are some calls now to cede Arab parts of Jerusalem to the Palestinians so as to separate Jews and Muslims. Would that help ease tensions in the city?
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