Reviewing the second installment in a projected three-volume biography of the much-hated American rabbi, written by his widow Libby, Elliot Jager reflects on Kahane’s career and his transformation from leader of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) to leader of the (now-illegal) Israeli political party Kach:

Kahane was one of the most influential, selfless, brilliant American Jewish personalities of the post-World War II era. . . . Under Kahane, the JDL was a catalyst pressuring the U.S. Jewish establishment to put Soviet Jewry, Jewish poverty, and urban anti-Semitism higher on its agenda. Kahane in his original JDL incarnation saved the souls of countless impressionable young Jews from terminal ennui if not outright assimilation. . . .

I found the early Kahane mesmerizing. I first appreciated the enormity of the Shoah because he talked about it when others didn’t. Following him into the street from the auditorium of Hunter College chanting “Never Again” and sitting down on Third Avenue and 67th Street near the Soviet UN mission in Manhattan was like an ecstatic-religious experience for me.

But in his [later] Kach incarnation his ideas sounded reactionary and repugnant. And for most people that is how he is remembered: for saying no to tolerance, no to respect for minority rights, no to religious pluralism, and no to compromise with political opponents.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.