From Palestine to Howard Beach and Houston: Meir Kahane, Moshe Cahana, and the Anti-Colonialism of American Civil Rights Struggles

This dissertation analyzes the political lives of cousins Rabbis Moshe Cahana and Meir Kahane to illuminate the diverse spectrum of Jewish political experience and the tensions around race and civil rights during the twentieth century. This study reconsiders the prominent New York ethnic nationalist Kahane through his seldom explored family ties, and is the first to introduce Cahana, a religious leader in Houston who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and became a national voice on Jewish non-violence. In this transnational study, I trace how the cousins’ distinct connection to their Hasidic family in pre-1948 Palestine shaped their divergent approaches to Zionism, European imperialism, American political inequality, and African American civil rights. Raised in Safed during the British Mandate, Moshe Cahana participated in the anti-British Jewish underground movement before moving to the Houston, Texas in 1959 and engaging in civil rights activity. Cahana’s example reveals new ways in which American racial ideologies and political developments often transcended national boundaries and offers another angle on how American civil rights struggles borrowed ideas and strategies from post-World War II decolonization struggles. In contrast, Meir Kahane internalized Jewish struggles in fascist Europe and in Israel, concentrating on a quest for Jewish survival. What inspired one cousin to non-violence, set the other on a path to build a Jewish militant organization, the Jewish Defense League, in 1968. Kahane saw African Americans in Brooklyn as threats, creating a fissure in the Black-Jewish relationships Moshe Cahana worked to deepen. Through this discussion, I highlight the often-murky relationship Jews had with imperialism and colonialism, further uncover transnational and inter-racial politics in the American civil rights movement, and reveal the malleability of Jewish racial and religious identity in Israel and the Diaspora