Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews

Spouting familiar rhetoric, controversial Israeli Knesset member Kahane (Never Again, etc.), founder of the Jewish Defense League and the ultraconservative Kach Movement, heaps abuse on the Israeli and American Jewish establishment (labeled here as fascists, liberal moral prostitutes, masochists, killers, hypocrites, moral cowards, schizophrenics, gentilized Hebrews ""who pollute us with their sick self-hate and hatred of other Jews''). He also rails against ``widespread sexual perversion among Arabs'' and claims that ``attacks on Kahane and Kahanism are attacks on Judaism, and when they say that Kahane is a racist, what they really mean is that Judaism is racist, per se.'' If this vituperation succumbs to repetitious bombast, biblical exhortations and messianic mumbo jumbo, it is also lively, articulate, well-documented and displays a knack for exposing Israeli and American Jewish vulnerabilitiesof the former, the alarming, ever-widening polarization between Israeli secular and religious Jews, and the difficulties of a country striving to be both Jewish and democratic. (May 25)