Dreams Defended and Deferred: The Brooklyn Schools Crisis of 1968 and Black Power’s Influence on Rabbi Meir Kahane

In a 1951 poem entitled “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asked “What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?/ . . . Or does it explode?” Twenty years later, deferred dreams of racial democracy in education and home ownership appeared to be drying up and exploding all at once in New York City. It was in 1971, three years after his rise to prominence as the founder of the Jewish Defense League, that the New York Times described Rabbi Meir Kahane sitting at his desk as “a slight, dark, handsome man in a blue suit and white shirt open at the collar,” wearing a black wool yarmulke. He was barely forty, “yet the soft gestures, the head-nodding, the weary, knowing air give him the aspect of a much older man, or a man in an old tradition.” With this litany of agedness, the writer thus made a nodding reference to the alleged antiquity of Kahane’s yeshiva-bred mannerisms, but the contrasting counterpunch came quickly: “His accent, however, is contemporary New York.”¹ Indeed, it was contemporary New York, with its discontented racial “minorities” and white “ethnics” that both catalyzed and accented Kahane’s early movement of Jewish militarism, and informed his philosophy, style, and tactics.

In these volatile times, it was Black Power politics, “Black is Beautiful” affirmation, and Black-Jewish conflict that pushed Kahane to found the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968 as an answer to Jewish assimilation and victimization, and he bequeathed to the world the still-current slogan “Never Again.” Kahane explicitly modeled his “Jewish Panthers” on the Black Power movement, especially the Black Panthers, even as he ironically targeted Black Power activists and organizations before turning his attention to Soviet and Palestinian Arab foes. Kahane adopted not only the bravado and tactics of Black Power organizations, but he also adopted the goal of instilling pride in his people. Appropriating the slogan “Black is beautiful,” Kahane repeatedly proclaimed, “Jewish is beautiful,” and told young audiences “be proud that you’re a Jew.”² In 1971, Kahane cited instilling pride in young Jews as his foremost accomplishment. He recounted, “there were so many young Jews who were very envious of black soul, brothers and sisters, who yearned for it. So they tried to become black or they tried to become this or that. But they’re not black; they are not this or that. They’re Jews.” ³ When asked directly if his tactics had been influenced by the success of Black militants, he replied: “Of course.”⁴

In New York City the long simmering racial tensions centering on residential integration and desegregation of local schools in the 1960s had a series of broad-ranging and long-lasting effects. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools controversy of 1968 launched Kahane into political activism, first as the founder of the Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn, and later as a rightwing ultranationalist in Israel. The racial crisis in Brooklyn in the late 1960s fueled the Jewish settler movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States. Kahane even instigated the firestorm that doomed Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984, and provoked Louis Farrakhan into making a series of antisemitic statements that made the leader of the Nation of Islam nationally notorious. Hence, the racial politics of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras in New York City’s Jewish communities had lasting impacts for decades to come, and have lasted long after Kahane himself was slain by an assassin’s bullets in 1990.⁵

There is a need for more thoughtful analysis of Kahane’s ideas and influences. As Shaul Magid points out, Kahane admired Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and other Black Power icons, and like Malcolm X was slain by an assassin, but he is seldom studied in Jewish Studies programs, in contrast to Malcolm X’s popularity in African American Studies courses.⁶ Always an embarrassment to most American...