What Jewish Extremists Get Wrong—and Right

Growing up as the son of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, Yossi Klein Halevi was deeply shaped by a sense of Jewish identity, his father’s wartime experiences, and his father’s anger at what he perceived as American Jews’ passivity regarding the fate of European brethren. Halevi himself migrated from the right-wing Zionist Beitar youth movement, to the movement to aid Soviet Jewry that emerged in the 1960s, to Rabbi Meir Kahane’s militant, sometimes violent, and often racist Jewish Defense League (JDL). Sometime after breaking with JDL in the 1970s, Halevi wrote of his experiences in Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, a work whose themes he revisits in conversation with Jonathan Silver. (Audio, 73 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)