Yossi Klein Halevis first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, was initiallypublished on November 6, 1995 two days after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. An account of his youthful involvement in the violent activism fostered by Rabbi Meir Kahane in the Jewish Defense League at the turn of the 1970s, and his subsequent sobering up, it was commercially doomed by the appalling coincidence. Because of its title, a much-needed warningabout the terrible appeal of Jewish extremism and its horrific potential consequences was misperceived as a justification of such radicalism.
Klein Halevi recalls walking into a New York bookstore and being told by the owner, That book will never appear in my store. The author attempted to reason with him: I said to him, Its actually a book against Jewish extremism. And he said, I dont care what it is. That book, with that title, is not going to be in this store.’
Nineteen years later, Memoirs is now being re-released, with a new introduction that documents its strange history. Dismally, its author believes, it is actually more relevant today than it was even then, when an Israeli Jewish extremist had just gunned down the prime minister in cold blood. How so? Because, argues Halevi, Israel again finds itself embroiled in Jewish extremism, amid rising anti-democratic, violent tendencies among some of its youth, culminating earlier this summer in what he calls an unthinkable act: Jewskidnapping a 16-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammed Abu Khdeir, and burning him alive. None of us would have believed before that happened that Jews any Jews would be capable of doing that, Halevi says. I dont believe that the Jews I knew in the JDL would have been capable of doing that.
I sat down last week with Halevi a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and the author of last years acclaimed Like Dreamers to talk about the impressionable youth whose story he recountsin Memoirs, and the anguished adult he has become. We began by discussingthe struggle for the release of Soviet Jewry, whose cause first inflamed him more than four decades ago, and the conversation moved on to the wider Jewish relationship with the rest of the world, and on through subsequent violent punctuations of the Jewish-Israeli narrative.
Yossi Klein Halevis re-released Memoirs
The interview is partly a confessional, as is the re-released Memoirs, since Klein Halevi acknowledges that Theres a link between the world I come from, the story that I tell in this book, from the Meir Kahane of Brooklyn in the late 1960s, to the Meir Kahane of Israel in the 70s and the 80s, and then to Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994, to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to the burning of this boy
We opened the door to self-righteous violence, he laments, the mentality that says, the whole world hates us and therefore there are no innocents in the world, there are no innocent passersby. Thats the ground from which all forms of terrorism emerge.
But it is, mainly, a cautionary tale again, as is the book a warning that it is imperative to deal with the extremist temptation and the release of moral restraint within parts of the Jewish community, which Halevi considers a threat to our soul as well as to our safety here in Israel.
When did you write Memoirs? In contrast to Like Dreamers, this wasnt a book you worked on for 11 years.
This was actually more like a 25-year book project. I started writing Memoirs in 1972, when I was 19, and I was very much in the world of Jewish militancy. I intended the book as a defense of the JDL and Meir Kahane. To my good fortune, I started taking notes. Many of the incidents and conversations that appear in the book from those years were not based on memory but on notes taken in live time.
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On Rabin anniversary, warnings of a former extremist | The …