Welcome, listeners.

This is Rusty Reno at First Things Magazine,

and this is the next episode of the editor's desk.

And I have with me today J.J. Kinchie,

and to talk about a recent book about Meyer Kahane.

And so, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

I do remember him from my youth. I kind of came of age in the 1970s when perhaps he was at his zenith of fame and influence. And even though I lived in a thoroughly Gentile world, he was just this

radical figure. So tell us a little about who he was and what the trajectory of his career was.

Sure. So Mayor Kahana, he was, I think, best summed up as a radical political activist.

He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and became an Orthodox Jewish rabbi at a fairly young age.

But he rose to prominence in the late 1960s here in the

United States with the foundation of the Jewish Defense League, the JDL, whose ideology was very simple.

It was the protection of Jewish lives and Jewish property by any means necessary.

And of course, that means generally something like violence, very confrontational political

methods, et cetera. And Kahana and his,

you know, the supporters he gathered around him were responding to rising anti-Semitism here in the

United States. They were also responding to the virtual imprisonment of Soviet jury behind the

Iron Wall. And they seem to intuit that conventional political methods

wouldn't solve this issue and therefore chose unconventional and generally violent

and confrontational methods in order to achieve their aims. So, you know, the establishment,

for instance, of sort of vigilante neighborhood patrols to protect Jews and, you know, very quite violent protests

on behalf of Serbia jury in many places. So this is the sort of, these are the sorts of actions

...