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Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story
An award-winning Israeli journalist recounts his youth as a Jewish activist in America and the Soviet Union, his devotion to the late rabbi Meir Kahane, and his eventual moderation and advocacy of Jewish-Gentile reconciliation.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published November 13, 1995
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December 27, 2020
During his youth in Brooklyn, Yossi Klein Halevi was a follower of the Jewish Defense League leader Meir Kahane. A teenage radical during the remarkably violent 1960s and 70s in New York, Halevi took the bitter lessons he learnt from his Holocaust-survivor father and turned them into an all-encompassing ideology of victimhood and revenge. Halevi wasn't a terrorist per se, as the title of this book might imply. But he had an incredibly hermetic and angry worldview throughout his youth, only mellowing somewhat as years went by. This book is his memoir as well as an insight into what drove some American Jews of his time to identify so strongly with Israel that the actual place of their birth and upbringing was almost an irrelevance. It is an attitude familiar to me from certain highly-insular Muslims, but seemed to reach a particularly acute level in Halevi and many of his generation in Borough Park. Indeed, he left the United States as soon as possible and became an Israeli.
The Holocaust towered over Halevi's life from the beginning. His father was a survivor from a small town in Hungary, and that experience more or less shaped his son's identity. Every group of people have their own tragedies that in their own minds stand as history's unparalleled crime; Partition being the big one for many South Asians. In Halevi's telling, the Holocaust for he and his friends was the sun around which their small universe revolved. It caused a great deal of pain and pessimism for him, the perennial fear of being "excluded from humanity" as a people and a generalized mistrust of all outside of his cloistered community. Halevi describes his life in New York as being a "planet of the Jews" in which he rarely ever spoke to anyone outside of a few Jewish ethnic enclaves. It was difficult to learn to look at himself as a member of a broader humanity after growing up in such an insular moral universe. He does not really overcome this at the time of writing, but he seems to at least be aware of it as an aspect of himself.
As a young Jewish Defense League militant, Halevi took part in rallies and direct actions aimed at furthering the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union and also to send a message to local Blacks, Italians and other perceived anti-Semites at home and abroad. While he doesn't harm anyone in his own narrative he does carry a weapon and enough righteous indignation in his heart to think that killings done by others, whether the Israeli army in the Middle East or the JDL in New York are morally acceptable. A sense of urgency mixed with an overwhelming image of oneself as a victim can lead to terrible excesses, as well as a belief in ones own moral immunity. These are sentiments that extremists of all types share and that Halevi concedes exist in himself on some level. In his psychological rootlessness, xenophobia, and desire for vengeance over a thousand current and past injustices, he reminds me of some of the more extreme pan-Islamist activists of the present.
The Holocaust was a great crime and it inevitably left a psychological wound on generations of Jewish people to come, particularly those like Halevi who were the direct offspring of its survivors. While it targeted a particular community there is a universal lesson to take from it. One can see the Nazi genocide as having been committed by a revived paganism, armed with the powers of modern technology, against a believing monotheistic people, who died in their millions in martyrdom for the truth. Reflecting on a photo of laughing SS executioners about to execute a rabbi determinedly saying his last prayers to the One God, Halevi observed that despite their momentary victory the Nazis belonged to a "meaningless cosmos," while Europe's Jews belonged to an "ordered world," in which, despite appearances, good in the end always triumphed over evil.
It was useful hearing how Halevi emotionally processed the Holocaust throughout his life. Even as a born American he always felt like a perpetual outsider from society, waiting for the pogromists to come rolling into Borough Park from the adjoining neighborhoods, though in fact they never came. It seemed like a difficult psychological experience. I can see a bit now why people of his temperament left the United States entirely for Israel. Along with other experiences, the elation felt by himself and many Brooklyn Jews following Israel's victory in the 1967 war was notable. Every suppressed and downtrodden people dreams of such a moment, asking when it will finally come.
Halevi does not have much sympathy for Palestinians, but nor does he seem to hate them. They're simply irrelevant – unwelcome characters in a historical drama of which he and his people are the stars. On his own terms, Halevi arguments are irrefutable. The Holocaust was the moment around which his worldview is defined. As many other people have to be broken or repressed to prevent even the remotest chance of that happening again it is perfectly acceptable: Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Iranians are all merely part of one undifferentiated and hostile Other whose particular histories or experiences are barely relevant. There is no compromising with such a perspective, though it must be understood. The only hope is to bargain with people like Halevi from a position of equality that results in everyone finally obtaining both peace and justice.
The Holocaust towered over Halevi's life from the beginning. His father was a survivor from a small town in Hungary, and that experience more or less shaped his son's identity. Every group of people have their own tragedies that in their own minds stand as history's unparalleled crime; Partition being the big one for many South Asians. In Halevi's telling, the Holocaust for he and his friends was the sun around which their small universe revolved. It caused a great deal of pain and pessimism for him, the perennial fear of being "excluded from humanity" as a people and a generalized mistrust of all outside of his cloistered community. Halevi describes his life in New York as being a "planet of the Jews" in which he rarely ever spoke to anyone outside of a few Jewish ethnic enclaves. It was difficult to learn to look at himself as a member of a broader humanity after growing up in such an insular moral universe. He does not really overcome this at the time of writing, but he seems to at least be aware of it as an aspect of himself.
As a young Jewish Defense League militant, Halevi took part in rallies and direct actions aimed at furthering the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union and also to send a message to local Blacks, Italians and other perceived anti-Semites at home and abroad. While he doesn't harm anyone in his own narrative he does carry a weapon and enough righteous indignation in his heart to think that killings done by others, whether the Israeli army in the Middle East or the JDL in New York are morally acceptable. A sense of urgency mixed with an overwhelming image of oneself as a victim can lead to terrible excesses, as well as a belief in ones own moral immunity. These are sentiments that extremists of all types share and that Halevi concedes exist in himself on some level. In his psychological rootlessness, xenophobia, and desire for vengeance over a thousand current and past injustices, he reminds me of some of the more extreme pan-Islamist activists of the present.
The Holocaust was a great crime and it inevitably left a psychological wound on generations of Jewish people to come, particularly those like Halevi who were the direct offspring of its survivors. While it targeted a particular community there is a universal lesson to take from it. One can see the Nazi genocide as having been committed by a revived paganism, armed with the powers of modern technology, against a believing monotheistic people, who died in their millions in martyrdom for the truth. Reflecting on a photo of laughing SS executioners about to execute a rabbi determinedly saying his last prayers to the One God, Halevi observed that despite their momentary victory the Nazis belonged to a "meaningless cosmos," while Europe's Jews belonged to an "ordered world," in which, despite appearances, good in the end always triumphed over evil.
It was useful hearing how Halevi emotionally processed the Holocaust throughout his life. Even as a born American he always felt like a perpetual outsider from society, waiting for the pogromists to come rolling into Borough Park from the adjoining neighborhoods, though in fact they never came. It seemed like a difficult psychological experience. I can see a bit now why people of his temperament left the United States entirely for Israel. Along with other experiences, the elation felt by himself and many Brooklyn Jews following Israel's victory in the 1967 war was notable. Every suppressed and downtrodden people dreams of such a moment, asking when it will finally come.
Halevi does not have much sympathy for Palestinians, but nor does he seem to hate them. They're simply irrelevant – unwelcome characters in a historical drama of which he and his people are the stars. On his own terms, Halevi arguments are irrefutable. The Holocaust was the moment around which his worldview is defined. As many other people have to be broken or repressed to prevent even the remotest chance of that happening again it is perfectly acceptable: Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Iranians are all merely part of one undifferentiated and hostile Other whose particular histories or experiences are barely relevant. There is no compromising with such a perspective, though it must be understood. The only hope is to bargain with people like Halevi from a position of equality that results in everyone finally obtaining both peace and justice.
April 21, 2014
Yossi Klein Halevi wrote Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist at age 43. It is less a memoir than a reflection on his youth, on the place of the holocaust on the second generation, and on Jewish extremism in America in the 60s. His background, as the child of a holocaust survivor, shapes the trajectory of his compelling story. He begins the book with: “My father lived in a hole.” Then he explains: “When the Nazis invaded Transylvania and the Jews of my father’s town, Nagy-Karoly, were sent to the cattlecars, he didn’t go. Instead, he fled to the forest, dug a hole, and lived in it until the end of the war.” The clever renegade was twenty five years old. The year was 1944.
The central lesson that Klein Halevi’s father took from his ordeal was this: only individualists survive. That is what he taught his son. “Never listen to ‘people’,” he told his son over and over again. Halevi tells us that his father’s stories filled him before he could understand them; the older man’s memories the son’s. The holocaust, says Halevi, was his own “inherited trauma,” and his father’s words became his mantra: “‘People’ are fools, victims. When they go left, go right; when they go to the cattlecars, go to the forest.” His father’s experience wove itself into the fabric of the son’s existence. He writes: “I despised even more than Nazis those who could have helped save Europe’s Jews but didn’t. The spectators' very innocence is their guilt, their comfort and distance an affront to your pain.”
Raised in Borough Park, an ultra-orthodox section of Brooklyn, NY, young Yossi Klein (“Halevi” came later) was given a Yeshiva education. This in spite of the fact that the war had cost his father his faith. But when he arrived in this country and met the woman he would marry, she, a rabbi’s daughter, made orthodoxy a precondition for marriage. “What you believe is your business,” she told him, “but we will have a proper Jewish home.” Klein Halevi adds: “My father returned to Judaism only grudgingly. [He] never spoke to me about God, except as irony. Echoing my mother, he said to me, “I don’t care what you believe, as long as you live a Jewish life.” The son—proud, dutiful, loving and loyal—was determined to play his part in Jewish history. He succeeded.
The author’s childhood was marked by youthful passion, which he channeled into Jewish idealism. Many, if not most, of his childhood friends were children of survivors whose numbers, tattooed on their arms, bore witness to the horrors they had endured. Says Halevi: “Borough Park’s Hasidim were trying to defeat the Holocaust by resurrecting the world it had destroyed; they recreated the only alternative to Auschwitz that they knew, a society that valued children, Torah, study, charity.” In a sense, these children were raised in a living holocaust museum. They did not engage in frivolity. That would have been the equivalent of blasphemy in this closed community of believers. “What I knew about Christianity,” Halevi writes, “is that it worshiped a dead Jew. The idea made me queasy: Christians seemed to be celebrating Jewish death.” The young Jews of Borough Park embraced their insulation. They avoided neighboring groups who often struck out at Jewish kids.
Through his childhood, Yossi Klein Halevi remained true to his father’s rule: disobey orders. As the author entered adolescence, he dallied with militant, even extreme Jewish groups. Living on the cutting edge, he felt himself part of a generation of Jews who would not be victimized. They must fight. He became a leader in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), founded in the early 60s. Later, he joined the Jewish Defense League, founded in 1968. He describes how these groups absorbed some of the culture of black militants. At Jewish rallies, participants wore “tight jeans and berets and green army coats; buttons with borrowed slogans of black militants: Jewish is Beautiful; Jewish Power; and NEVER AGAIN printed over tiny repetitive names of Nazi death camps.” The nascent author said that listening to JDL’s firebrand leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was like listening to his father. For the militant JDL, young Yossi Klein became a passionate voice of loyalty, defiance, Jewish pride and outrage.
During the period that young Klein Halevi was in Kahane’s thrall, the man’s rhetoric felt apt. The future writer loved the way the man spurned conventional notions of dignity and decorum; the way Kahane would stop at nothing to preserve Jewish lives. The JDL’s response to Nixon’s policy of Soviet-American détente was: “Don't build bridges over Jewish bodies.” But by the time the author, at age 29, made Aliyah with his new wife, the focus of his idealism had shifted. He was less committed to fighting, more inclined to seek dialogue. He outgrew his father’s injunction, and he became disenchanted with Kahane, who now seemed less a liberator than a thug. Halevi’s powers of insight show themselves in his reaction to meeting Meir Kahane in Jerusalem. Kahane, says Halevi, “stuttered and twitched more in conversation than he did in public speech, and I recognized myself in him: eloquent for the cause but inadequate in private.”
The book is replete with such insights. See, for instance, how he describes youthful American volunteers, who filled tanks with gas in Sinai during the Yom Kippur war (1973). He writes: “They seemed pleased with their adventure; they had almost been soldiers. I saw myself in them; consumers of experience, looking for vicarious dangers...To be an American Jew meant being inherently inauthentic, a spectator to Jewish history.”
This author was determined to be part of Jewish history, never just a spectator. As one of Israel’s most prominent investigative journalists and a voice of reason among the many political and religious factions in Israel today, he has made his mark. He published Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist in 1995. His second book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (2001), tells of his excursions into the worlds of Christians and Moslems, whom he joined in prayer and meditations. He visited mosques and monasteries despite the grave physical dangers posed by those excursions. He is brave. He was on a quest. Through collaborative religious practice, he sought reconciliation within the region’s three dominant faiths. The book is a page-turner. Of his latest book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided A Nation (2013), the ambassador and historian, Michael Oren, said: “You must read it, for nothing better explains what has happened (and how) within Israel since the ’67 War.” The book is taut, like a good action movie, and it draws the reader into the personal histories of those who were at the vanguard in Israel’s continuing fight for survival.
Yossi Klein was named for his grandfather, Josef Klein, who perished in the holocaust. The grandson added “Halevi” to his name after moving to Israel. As an American-Israeli journalist, he wrote for The Jerusalem Report, The Jerusalem Post, the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally for the New York Times and Washington Post. Today, he is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research institute and educational center. He is the Israel correspondent and contributing editor for The New Republic, and he tours the lecture circuit at American and Canadian campuses, focusing on politics and culture in Israel. Since the fall of 2013, he teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is a personification of tikkun olam.
[This review was written for the Washtenaw Jewish News.]
The central lesson that Klein Halevi’s father took from his ordeal was this: only individualists survive. That is what he taught his son. “Never listen to ‘people’,” he told his son over and over again. Halevi tells us that his father’s stories filled him before he could understand them; the older man’s memories the son’s. The holocaust, says Halevi, was his own “inherited trauma,” and his father’s words became his mantra: “‘People’ are fools, victims. When they go left, go right; when they go to the cattlecars, go to the forest.” His father’s experience wove itself into the fabric of the son’s existence. He writes: “I despised even more than Nazis those who could have helped save Europe’s Jews but didn’t. The spectators' very innocence is their guilt, their comfort and distance an affront to your pain.”
Raised in Borough Park, an ultra-orthodox section of Brooklyn, NY, young Yossi Klein (“Halevi” came later) was given a Yeshiva education. This in spite of the fact that the war had cost his father his faith. But when he arrived in this country and met the woman he would marry, she, a rabbi’s daughter, made orthodoxy a precondition for marriage. “What you believe is your business,” she told him, “but we will have a proper Jewish home.” Klein Halevi adds: “My father returned to Judaism only grudgingly. [He] never spoke to me about God, except as irony. Echoing my mother, he said to me, “I don’t care what you believe, as long as you live a Jewish life.” The son—proud, dutiful, loving and loyal—was determined to play his part in Jewish history. He succeeded.
The author’s childhood was marked by youthful passion, which he channeled into Jewish idealism. Many, if not most, of his childhood friends were children of survivors whose numbers, tattooed on their arms, bore witness to the horrors they had endured. Says Halevi: “Borough Park’s Hasidim were trying to defeat the Holocaust by resurrecting the world it had destroyed; they recreated the only alternative to Auschwitz that they knew, a society that valued children, Torah, study, charity.” In a sense, these children were raised in a living holocaust museum. They did not engage in frivolity. That would have been the equivalent of blasphemy in this closed community of believers. “What I knew about Christianity,” Halevi writes, “is that it worshiped a dead Jew. The idea made me queasy: Christians seemed to be celebrating Jewish death.” The young Jews of Borough Park embraced their insulation. They avoided neighboring groups who often struck out at Jewish kids.
Through his childhood, Yossi Klein Halevi remained true to his father’s rule: disobey orders. As the author entered adolescence, he dallied with militant, even extreme Jewish groups. Living on the cutting edge, he felt himself part of a generation of Jews who would not be victimized. They must fight. He became a leader in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), founded in the early 60s. Later, he joined the Jewish Defense League, founded in 1968. He describes how these groups absorbed some of the culture of black militants. At Jewish rallies, participants wore “tight jeans and berets and green army coats; buttons with borrowed slogans of black militants: Jewish is Beautiful; Jewish Power; and NEVER AGAIN printed over tiny repetitive names of Nazi death camps.” The nascent author said that listening to JDL’s firebrand leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was like listening to his father. For the militant JDL, young Yossi Klein became a passionate voice of loyalty, defiance, Jewish pride and outrage.
During the period that young Klein Halevi was in Kahane’s thrall, the man’s rhetoric felt apt. The future writer loved the way the man spurned conventional notions of dignity and decorum; the way Kahane would stop at nothing to preserve Jewish lives. The JDL’s response to Nixon’s policy of Soviet-American détente was: “Don't build bridges over Jewish bodies.” But by the time the author, at age 29, made Aliyah with his new wife, the focus of his idealism had shifted. He was less committed to fighting, more inclined to seek dialogue. He outgrew his father’s injunction, and he became disenchanted with Kahane, who now seemed less a liberator than a thug. Halevi’s powers of insight show themselves in his reaction to meeting Meir Kahane in Jerusalem. Kahane, says Halevi, “stuttered and twitched more in conversation than he did in public speech, and I recognized myself in him: eloquent for the cause but inadequate in private.”
The book is replete with such insights. See, for instance, how he describes youthful American volunteers, who filled tanks with gas in Sinai during the Yom Kippur war (1973). He writes: “They seemed pleased with their adventure; they had almost been soldiers. I saw myself in them; consumers of experience, looking for vicarious dangers...To be an American Jew meant being inherently inauthentic, a spectator to Jewish history.”
This author was determined to be part of Jewish history, never just a spectator. As one of Israel’s most prominent investigative journalists and a voice of reason among the many political and religious factions in Israel today, he has made his mark. He published Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist in 1995. His second book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (2001), tells of his excursions into the worlds of Christians and Moslems, whom he joined in prayer and meditations. He visited mosques and monasteries despite the grave physical dangers posed by those excursions. He is brave. He was on a quest. Through collaborative religious practice, he sought reconciliation within the region’s three dominant faiths. The book is a page-turner. Of his latest book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided A Nation (2013), the ambassador and historian, Michael Oren, said: “You must read it, for nothing better explains what has happened (and how) within Israel since the ’67 War.” The book is taut, like a good action movie, and it draws the reader into the personal histories of those who were at the vanguard in Israel’s continuing fight for survival.
Yossi Klein was named for his grandfather, Josef Klein, who perished in the holocaust. The grandson added “Halevi” to his name after moving to Israel. As an American-Israeli journalist, he wrote for The Jerusalem Report, The Jerusalem Post, the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally for the New York Times and Washington Post. Today, he is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research institute and educational center. He is the Israel correspondent and contributing editor for The New Republic, and he tours the lecture circuit at American and Canadian campuses, focusing on politics and culture in Israel. Since the fall of 2013, he teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is a personification of tikkun olam.
[This review was written for the Washtenaw Jewish News.]
January 12, 2016
My five star rating is entirely subjective. I don't know how others might feel about this book, or whether it would speak to them the way it spoke to me. I found it highly compelling, but I'm sure that has at least as much to do with my own background and interests as with the book's objective power.
I very much enjoyed Like Dreamers: The Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, and the Divided Israel They Created and was eager to read this, the author's far more personal book. Here, Yossi Klein Halevi describes his Orthodox childhood in 1950s-1970s Boro Park, raised by a Holocaust survivor father whose views were very much shaped by his experiences and the broader reactions of Jewry to the Holocaust. From an early age, Yossi felt passionate about wanting to fight for Jewish causes and sacrificed his grades and other more typical pursuits as well as intellectually honest complex thinking in service of becoming a radical activist. As Yossi matured, he began to struggle with the fascinating insight that rather than a way to fully embrace life, his activist activities were actually an escape. Gradually, he distanced himself from radical friends and ways of thinking and found more moderate ways to advocate for fellow Jews, joining the ranks of individuals he had earlier disdained.
Some of the appeal of this book for me, admittedly, lay in the familiarity of Yossi's childhood context (although he's significantly older than I am) and the influences that shaped his thinking. I also loved his passion and his earnest desire to act, not just think and feel. Most of all, though, I appreciated Yossi's honesty and insight. While adeptly helping the reader feel what he felt and understand his choices, Yossi remains self-critical and causes you to consider the flaws as well as the appeal of embracing an activist view.
I very much enjoyed Like Dreamers: The Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, and the Divided Israel They Created and was eager to read this, the author's far more personal book. Here, Yossi Klein Halevi describes his Orthodox childhood in 1950s-1970s Boro Park, raised by a Holocaust survivor father whose views were very much shaped by his experiences and the broader reactions of Jewry to the Holocaust. From an early age, Yossi felt passionate about wanting to fight for Jewish causes and sacrificed his grades and other more typical pursuits as well as intellectually honest complex thinking in service of becoming a radical activist. As Yossi matured, he began to struggle with the fascinating insight that rather than a way to fully embrace life, his activist activities were actually an escape. Gradually, he distanced himself from radical friends and ways of thinking and found more moderate ways to advocate for fellow Jews, joining the ranks of individuals he had earlier disdained.
Some of the appeal of this book for me, admittedly, lay in the familiarity of Yossi's childhood context (although he's significantly older than I am) and the influences that shaped his thinking. I also loved his passion and his earnest desire to act, not just think and feel. Most of all, though, I appreciated Yossi's honesty and insight. While adeptly helping the reader feel what he felt and understand his choices, Yossi remains self-critical and causes you to consider the flaws as well as the appeal of embracing an activist view.
September 21, 2014
In many ways, the author's childhood had many similarities to my own. Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn, New York at about the same time. But while the Holocaust looms over everything Halevi experienced it played a much smaller role in my life. Both my parents had been in America long before World War II. Whereas, Halevi's father survived the Holocaust by hiding in a hole in the ground in his native Hungary.
Halevi presents his story and that of his father, brilliantly. This a wonderfully rich memoir written by a talented writer. By book's end you know Halevi, his family, his friends, and his community. I thoroughly enjoyed this slice of American Jewish life. I'm pretty certain I was at one of the Soviet Jewry demonstrations Halevi participated in.
Halevi presents his story and that of his father, brilliantly. This a wonderfully rich memoir written by a talented writer. By book's end you know Halevi, his family, his friends, and his community. I thoroughly enjoyed this slice of American Jewish life. I'm pretty certain I was at one of the Soviet Jewry demonstrations Halevi participated in.
October 29, 2015
I just want to read everything that Yossi Klein Halevi writes
February 24, 2009
In this memoir, Yossi Klein Halevi, an American Jew whose father was a Holocaust survivor, grows up in New York in an Orthodox neighborhood and tries to make sense of the world that his father left behind. After the Nazis came to his town, his father hid in a hole for the duration of the war and when it finished, immigrated to America. But where other survivors were shattered or in denial, Halevi's father was angry -- angry at the Nazis, angry at American Jewry for their quiescence, and angry at the secular and religious Jews who trusted their neighbors and dismissed Zionism as a fool's errand, even as they went to their deaths. Ever his father's son, Halevi makes those experiences his own and makes it his goal to prevent what happened to his father's neighbors from happening again.
Though Halevi grows up in an Orthodox neighborhood and knows their explanations for the Holocaust (the descendants of Jacob and Esau fighting once more; the new generation rising again to destroy the Jews from the time of Haman), he has little use for his neighbors, who he sees as desperately clinging to the shattered world of Eastern European Jewry and as insular and weak as before the Holocaust. Accordingly, rather than be part of their world, he rebels against it, first by separation from the non-Jewish world, then by student activism for the plight of Soviet Jewry, and finally by joining Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Always in his mind are the Holocaust and his sense that he understands its lessons and is uniquely suited to apply them.
The book honestly grapples with the seductive demagoguery of Kahane and Halevi's journey from a fire-breathing activist to cynic and eventual thug. The book also intelligently lays out how Halevi became who he was; how the certainty of his cause and his response to the Holocaust go from energy and righteousness to an enervated, barricade mentality, contemptuous of both the non-Jewish world and Jews who disagree with him. The obsessive framing of everything through the death camps and an us-versus-them mentality pound away at him, leaving him hardened, but also incapable of feeling anything other than highs or lows. The emotional climax of the book comes at a concentration camp with Halevi, wrapped in tefillin, trying to bear witness to the dead:
"I opened my eyes and looked into the oven. There were gum wrappers inside. Unthinking, I reached in to cleanse the desecration. My hand touched something soft, insubstantial: ash. I removed my hand and held it, rigid, at a distance, as if it no longer belonged to me. Perhaps then I realized that one can violate death not only with irreverence but with excessive intimacy."
Understanding, finally, that the only response to the Holocaust is to live, he can step out of death's shadow and embrace the world in its maddening complexity. Even more importantly, for him, is that he can derive a moral order set forth by God and be at peace with it. Thus, by not obsessing over the nihilism of the Nazi vision, by realizing that the world was no longer his father's, and by understanding through his wife the importance of sanctifying the ordinary and the preciousness of sacred time, his extremism melts away and he can finally become a person. He also learns through his wife (a convert) and the man who saved his father's life (a non-Jew) that the world is much more complex and much better than anyone, especially an extremist, can understand. Recommended.
Though Halevi grows up in an Orthodox neighborhood and knows their explanations for the Holocaust (the descendants of Jacob and Esau fighting once more; the new generation rising again to destroy the Jews from the time of Haman), he has little use for his neighbors, who he sees as desperately clinging to the shattered world of Eastern European Jewry and as insular and weak as before the Holocaust. Accordingly, rather than be part of their world, he rebels against it, first by separation from the non-Jewish world, then by student activism for the plight of Soviet Jewry, and finally by joining Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Always in his mind are the Holocaust and his sense that he understands its lessons and is uniquely suited to apply them.
The book honestly grapples with the seductive demagoguery of Kahane and Halevi's journey from a fire-breathing activist to cynic and eventual thug. The book also intelligently lays out how Halevi became who he was; how the certainty of his cause and his response to the Holocaust go from energy and righteousness to an enervated, barricade mentality, contemptuous of both the non-Jewish world and Jews who disagree with him. The obsessive framing of everything through the death camps and an us-versus-them mentality pound away at him, leaving him hardened, but also incapable of feeling anything other than highs or lows. The emotional climax of the book comes at a concentration camp with Halevi, wrapped in tefillin, trying to bear witness to the dead:
"I opened my eyes and looked into the oven. There were gum wrappers inside. Unthinking, I reached in to cleanse the desecration. My hand touched something soft, insubstantial: ash. I removed my hand and held it, rigid, at a distance, as if it no longer belonged to me. Perhaps then I realized that one can violate death not only with irreverence but with excessive intimacy."
Understanding, finally, that the only response to the Holocaust is to live, he can step out of death's shadow and embrace the world in its maddening complexity. Even more importantly, for him, is that he can derive a moral order set forth by God and be at peace with it. Thus, by not obsessing over the nihilism of the Nazi vision, by realizing that the world was no longer his father's, and by understanding through his wife the importance of sanctifying the ordinary and the preciousness of sacred time, his extremism melts away and he can finally become a person. He also learns through his wife (a convert) and the man who saved his father's life (a non-Jew) that the world is much more complex and much better than anyone, especially an extremist, can understand. Recommended.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 13, 2017
As someone who grew up during the 1970's era, which is the setting of much of the book, his experiences resonated for me. His journey begins as the child of a Holocaust survivor, raised in an Orthodox community in Brooklyn, involved in the struggle for Soviet Jewry and radicalized as a member of the Jewish Defense League. His experiences lead him to growth as he finds his way as a young journalist, seeks a broader understanding of how the Jewish community and Israel can interact with the broader world, and settles in Israel. His "happily ever after" phase seems to occur somewhat abruptly, and I was left ready to read his next books, which I will be binge reading.
January 8, 2023
This book reads like when you expect food to be soft but instead it's very chewy. It's not bad, definitely has some worthwhile things to say, but it was exhausting.
May 5, 2018
About half of this book gets five stars, especially the chapters and passages about the author’s father. Parts of the «extremist time» weren’t quite as interesting, some of it too juvenile (and perhaps a little dated as well) to mobilize great interest in, but I liked the Moscow action; and reading about Meir Kahane described as a loser by someone who actually knew him.
Everything about the Holocaust and its aftermath and effect through the generations is really well written. The feeling of what Israel meant and still means to many - most - Jews is also communicated well. I liked this book a lot.
Everything about the Holocaust and its aftermath and effect through the generations is really well written. The feeling of what Israel meant and still means to many - most - Jews is also communicated well. I liked this book a lot.
January 27, 2018
I have loved Yossi Klein Halevi's writing since I read, "Like Dreamers," and this book is a fascinating look into his personal life as a Jew. I really enjoyed his explanations of the nuances of the different Jewish subcultures of which he was a part, and found a lot of his views on Zionism very similar to mine, which was validating. This book is also an interesting perspective on the Holocaust and how we conceptualize the slaughter of millions of Jews, and how we live with the aftermath of that tragedy as individuals and as a religious and cultural collective.
June 9, 2008
I'd recommend this if you ever wondered how a person could cross the line from activist to extremist. Halevi came to that line, played hopscotch on it, and then came to his senses before it was too late. It can be cumbersome about halfway through, but it makes for a well balanced picture of misdirected enthusiasm.
May 4, 2016
Fascinating. In addition to Halevi's life just being unique and Zelig-esque, his experience is emblematic of a certain kind of Holocaust survivor narrative. Moving, and infuriating, and inspiring.
January 26, 2023
This book is something of a bait-and-switch. Its title and subtitle promise a tale of extremism and transformation, but it's hard to really call it that.
The "extremism" of Klein Halevi's story involves his induction into the JDL, which was undoubtedly an extremist terrorist organization founded by Meir Kahane, an extremist rabbi and Jewish supremacist. All this is true. But the author was introduced to the JDL through one particular arm of its activities, namely the struggle to free Soviet Jews who were being punished and jailed for Zionism and/or desire to leave the USSR. This cause was just, and while the JDL's methods were often not, the author describes how his particular activities involved primarily peaceful civil disobedience and protest. The climax of this activity was flying to Moscow to be arrested there. To the extent that the author and his comrades were engaged in violence, it was primarily of a thuggish and petty nature, or in elaborate plans that never came to fruition.
Crucially, Kahane himself shows up rather briefly. First, around 100 pages into the book, he is portrayed as a charismatic leader whom the author follows devotedly-- but at this point Kahane's signature issues were, as mentioned, primarily popular and justifiable ones, and that is the side that seems to have drawn Klein Halevi. When he reappears, again briefly, toward the end of the book, Kahane has become the figure more familiar to audiences today: one advocating for ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs and apartheid laws for those who remain. But Klein Halevy has by this point broken off with Kahane and nothing in the book suggests that he was ever much enamored by this side of the man.
In other words, while the author did have a transformation of sorts, mostly from a hoodlum (as he himself indicates) to something of an intellectual and journalist, and from someone driven primarily by hate and distrust to a more moderate personality, this is not really a story of a transformation of an ideological extremist. The transformation indeed feels like little more than growing up, with fevered ideas about kidnapping the children of Soviet diplomats giving way to measured tones, sarcastic humor and a life of the pen. Much of the book, especially the last third or so, is devoted to that transformation of personality, and includes a lot of meditating on his family, marriage with his wife, and relation to God and the holocaust. This is perfectly appropriate in a memoir about Yossi Klein Halevy, and the book is very well written and has much going for it; but those looking for real insights into what pulls people into and pushes people out of extremism will be better served elsewhere.
The "extremism" of Klein Halevi's story involves his induction into the JDL, which was undoubtedly an extremist terrorist organization founded by Meir Kahane, an extremist rabbi and Jewish supremacist. All this is true. But the author was introduced to the JDL through one particular arm of its activities, namely the struggle to free Soviet Jews who were being punished and jailed for Zionism and/or desire to leave the USSR. This cause was just, and while the JDL's methods were often not, the author describes how his particular activities involved primarily peaceful civil disobedience and protest. The climax of this activity was flying to Moscow to be arrested there. To the extent that the author and his comrades were engaged in violence, it was primarily of a thuggish and petty nature, or in elaborate plans that never came to fruition.
Crucially, Kahane himself shows up rather briefly. First, around 100 pages into the book, he is portrayed as a charismatic leader whom the author follows devotedly-- but at this point Kahane's signature issues were, as mentioned, primarily popular and justifiable ones, and that is the side that seems to have drawn Klein Halevi. When he reappears, again briefly, toward the end of the book, Kahane has become the figure more familiar to audiences today: one advocating for ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs and apartheid laws for those who remain. But Klein Halevy has by this point broken off with Kahane and nothing in the book suggests that he was ever much enamored by this side of the man.
In other words, while the author did have a transformation of sorts, mostly from a hoodlum (as he himself indicates) to something of an intellectual and journalist, and from someone driven primarily by hate and distrust to a more moderate personality, this is not really a story of a transformation of an ideological extremist. The transformation indeed feels like little more than growing up, with fevered ideas about kidnapping the children of Soviet diplomats giving way to measured tones, sarcastic humor and a life of the pen. Much of the book, especially the last third or so, is devoted to that transformation of personality, and includes a lot of meditating on his family, marriage with his wife, and relation to God and the holocaust. This is perfectly appropriate in a memoir about Yossi Klein Halevy, and the book is very well written and has much going for it; but those looking for real insights into what pulls people into and pushes people out of extremism will be better served elsewhere.
September 7, 2025
Over the past year, I have been reading a book on the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the Refuseniks. In the book, I learned that Yossi Klein Halevi was once a Jewish militant. I associate Halevi with a conciliatory approach to Israeli-Palestinian politics, not the fiery extremism of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). The contrast between his past and current personas immediately caught my attention.
Halevi, the son of a Holocaust survivor, grew up in a tight-knit Jewish enclave in Brooklyn. His inherited trauma left him with a reservoir of bitterness and rage, fueling a desperate need for an outlet. When he learned about the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, he became obsessed with freeing the last fragments of European Jewry. His anger radiated in several directions: at the non-Jewish world for its capacity for evil, American Jews for prioritizing assimilation over aiding their foreign brethren, and the Soviet regime for restricting Jewish religious practice and emigration to Israel.
As he immersed himself in activism, the gentler appeals of mainstream voices felt increasingly hollow. Halevi joined the movement’s fringe and championed Jewish militancy. He threw chicken blood at Soviet ballerinas and traveled to Russia to protest in Soviet emigration offices. Halevi’s account offers an introspective look at those not-so-nice Jewish boys: the misfits of post-war America.
The memoir draws its power from its moments of pitch-black intensity. Halevi’s zealous attachment to Jewish politics is tragic in its pessimism. He is haunted by the stories of Jewish death and destruction passed down to him by his father. His frenzied intensity is matched only by the JDL’s leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, a notorious vigilante extremist. Kahane’s message for the diaspora was one of fierce ethnic loyalty, while his vision for the Holy Land was apocalyptic and illiberal. Radical Black movements of the period inspired the JDL, which bent their tactics and rhetoric in a right-wing direction of hardline Jewish particularism. The JDL was self-aggrandizing and juvenile, chilling in its capacity to enact harm. Several of Halevi’s peers are involved in bombings that result in the death of innocent bystanders. Halevi’s actions seem tame in comparison.
Writing with the benefit of hindsight, Halevi tempers his teenage rage with the sober reflections of a mature narrator. Indeed, the memoir’s central arc is Halevi’s evolution from ideological reactionary to moderate peacenik.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It gave me a glimpse into the darker side of the Soviet Jewry movement, and it was well-written.
Halevi, the son of a Holocaust survivor, grew up in a tight-knit Jewish enclave in Brooklyn. His inherited trauma left him with a reservoir of bitterness and rage, fueling a desperate need for an outlet. When he learned about the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, he became obsessed with freeing the last fragments of European Jewry. His anger radiated in several directions: at the non-Jewish world for its capacity for evil, American Jews for prioritizing assimilation over aiding their foreign brethren, and the Soviet regime for restricting Jewish religious practice and emigration to Israel.
As he immersed himself in activism, the gentler appeals of mainstream voices felt increasingly hollow. Halevi joined the movement’s fringe and championed Jewish militancy. He threw chicken blood at Soviet ballerinas and traveled to Russia to protest in Soviet emigration offices. Halevi’s account offers an introspective look at those not-so-nice Jewish boys: the misfits of post-war America.
The memoir draws its power from its moments of pitch-black intensity. Halevi’s zealous attachment to Jewish politics is tragic in its pessimism. He is haunted by the stories of Jewish death and destruction passed down to him by his father. His frenzied intensity is matched only by the JDL’s leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, a notorious vigilante extremist. Kahane’s message for the diaspora was one of fierce ethnic loyalty, while his vision for the Holy Land was apocalyptic and illiberal. Radical Black movements of the period inspired the JDL, which bent their tactics and rhetoric in a right-wing direction of hardline Jewish particularism. The JDL was self-aggrandizing and juvenile, chilling in its capacity to enact harm. Several of Halevi’s peers are involved in bombings that result in the death of innocent bystanders. Halevi’s actions seem tame in comparison.
Writing with the benefit of hindsight, Halevi tempers his teenage rage with the sober reflections of a mature narrator. Indeed, the memoir’s central arc is Halevi’s evolution from ideological reactionary to moderate peacenik.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It gave me a glimpse into the darker side of the Soviet Jewry movement, and it was well-written.
September 4, 2022
I found the book to be interesting; however, in truth, it left many questions unanswered. I did not grow up in Borough Park, but on Long Island, and even though I grew up a decade after Yossi Klein Halevi, I can relate to many of the events that influenced him. It was interesting to see how he came to engage and then eventually become disillusioned with the leaders and movements that shaped his life. However, I was never on the leading edge of these important events. At most I can claim is the JDL did try to recruit me after a group of teenagers formed a "Klan" in my school. The truth was, by that time the JDL had a reputation that I did not want to associate with at all.
And neither of my parents were Holocaust survivors. I knew many, but I did not live with them and they did not pass down their ethos to me on a daily basis. What I do admire about Yossi in the book is his willingness to take action. Whether it was joining SSSJ, Beitar, or the JDL, and ultimately his sit in at OVIR, I took from this book a person who does not sit back and watch history, but one who engages and forges history. Knowing his work after this period in life, I would retitle this book the Roots of Jewish Activism. Today, Yossi Klein Halevi is still engaged and taking action in his efforts to start dialogues with Palestinians on peace.
Although I greatly enjoy his books, especially "Like Dreamers" I would not recommend rushing out and reading this one; however, if you do get a chance, it is well written, enjoyable and an easy read.
And neither of my parents were Holocaust survivors. I knew many, but I did not live with them and they did not pass down their ethos to me on a daily basis. What I do admire about Yossi in the book is his willingness to take action. Whether it was joining SSSJ, Beitar, or the JDL, and ultimately his sit in at OVIR, I took from this book a person who does not sit back and watch history, but one who engages and forges history. Knowing his work after this period in life, I would retitle this book the Roots of Jewish Activism. Today, Yossi Klein Halevi is still engaged and taking action in his efforts to start dialogues with Palestinians on peace.
Although I greatly enjoy his books, especially "Like Dreamers" I would not recommend rushing out and reading this one; however, if you do get a chance, it is well written, enjoyable and an easy read.
July 15, 2019
I'm really glad I read this book and while it was published some time back (1995) it sheds so much light on the pain of the trauma of the Holocaust and the ripples that causes and caused in every direction including, in Halevi's case, for a time in his life - rage. While this book is, on the surface, very specifically about the Jewish experience post-WWII, in Brooklyn, it's also about where our pain goes and how we recreate trauma over and over. I think of the social and political conditions these days and the great trauma so many are experiencing right now, from displacement and refugees to illegal detention, homelessness, police brutality, broken families and racism and it chills me to think that the after-effects will be felt for a very long time, handed down through generations to the children. Halevi manages, after many years, to find grace, forgiveness and tolerance but he might well have continued in the other direction and created more loss and trauma for others. Thank goodness he didn't; this book is a powerful, timely and important read.
August 20, 2021
This is fascinating insight into how an activist goes on to become radicalised and-more importantly- de-radicalised. This book provided more of an insight into the mentality of an extremist, a feature which I felt was lacking from Ed Hussains' The Islamist.' While reading this book I was disconcerted by the similarities between Halevi's trajectory and that of Muslims radicalists I have known. If there is a flaw in the book it is Halevi's seemingly deliberate omission of his feelings towards Palestinians. He does say in the beginning that the prospect of an Israel without Palestine terrifies him just as much as the prospect of an Israel with Palestine. Make what you will of this gnomic remark, this book is a must-read because Halevi provides that window into his mind. Irrespective of whether or not you agree with the view you have to respectly the depth of the picture he presents.
November 21, 2025
This book through the narrative paints a picture of each strand of thought coming from the mainstream Jewish experience. Israelis, the Ultra-Orthodox, the Assimilationist American Jews, and the Zionist American Jews.
This books maps to a tee what it feels like to be Jewish, to inherit this cultural memory before you had any memories. To be surrounded by survivors and paranoia and to fit your worldview around this because it's all that's around you.
To understand post-Shoah Jewish mentality -- read this book.
"I opened my eyes and looked into the oven. There were gum wrappers inside. Unthinking, I reached in to cleanse the desecration. My hand touched something soft, insubstantial: ash. I removed my hand and held it, rigid, at a distance, as if it no longer belonged to me. Perhaps then I realized that one can violate death not only with irreverence but with excessive intimacy."
This books maps to a tee what it feels like to be Jewish, to inherit this cultural memory before you had any memories. To be surrounded by survivors and paranoia and to fit your worldview around this because it's all that's around you.
To understand post-Shoah Jewish mentality -- read this book.
"I opened my eyes and looked into the oven. There were gum wrappers inside. Unthinking, I reached in to cleanse the desecration. My hand touched something soft, insubstantial: ash. I removed my hand and held it, rigid, at a distance, as if it no longer belonged to me. Perhaps then I realized that one can violate death not only with irreverence but with excessive intimacy."
July 21, 2019
Really enjoyed the book (though for full disclosure: am generally a big fan of Yossi Klein Halevi). It was an honest and vulnerable account of how his own identity was formed in relation to his father's life experiences and outlook, and how, as he grew older, he came to discover that the right path for him - although maybe not that which his father would have predicted - was still based on the values his father taught him. All that said, don't be disappointed if you came here looking for extremism (at least by today's standards!). The title might be a bit sensationalist, but nonetheless, it's a great read.
March 22, 2020
An easy-to-read coming of age story. Because of the author's background (the son of a Holocaust survivor in a heavily Jewish neighborhood) he is drawn to causes related to protecting Jews - first the mainstream Soviet Jewry movement, then the more radical Jewish Defense League (JDL). As the JDL disintegrates due to its members' penchant for committing crimes and getting caught, the author grows up and becomes a responsible citizen.
December 8, 2024
I have been a fan of Yossi Klein Halevi through his work with the Shalom Hartman Institute. I am glad I picked this up. He --and his book here -- offer really important insights into the ideologies of the right-wing in particular. In a recent podcast episode, his former beliefs were critical in understanding some of the current moment, and not just for Israeli society. This is a must-read for understanding how people arrive at extreme ideologies and/or how people come to justify terrorism.
August 27, 2018
The author grew up hearing detailed stories from his father, who survived the Holocaust hidden in a hole in the ground. “Don’t follow. Defend yourself.” From that he took up the cause of defending the Jewish people, primarily the Russians who were not allowed to leave the Soviet Union. His extremism slowly evolved to living peacefully in Israel. Excellent book, wonderful writing.
April 10, 2023
This was a really engaging and informative read, if a little “in the weeds” at times. It provided a lot of helpful context for me and exposed me to a view point I was previously entirely unfamiliar with, all the while being a page-turning and enjoyable book!
March 29, 2018
I just didn't like Mr. Halevi and it is hard to like a memoir if you don't like its star.
December 19, 2018
This was a really interesting book, with details about groups and a period I didn't know much about. Definitely an interesting read.
April 17, 2020
Powerful memoir, captures a fascinating moment in New York Jewish history and Jewish-Zionist activism.
October 20, 2024
An incredible memoir. Beautifully written.
December 31, 2019
On my list of 25 books my daughter must read as she reaches adulthood.
October 28, 2014
Not as masterful as "Like Dreamers" (one of the greatest Jewish books written in the last 30 years) and "Garden of Eden", a good read and interesting. His story only gets better.
August 12, 2015
Interesting story, but really boring writing. Quick read but get it from the library- not worth buying it, I don't think.
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