Our Challenge (Paperback) | Released: 05 Feb 2017

Our Challenge, published in April 1974, offers a plan to infuse Jewish youth with an iron-clad sense of identity to make them impervious to modern Western influences and strong enough to overcome the weariness of an interminable struggle with the Arabs. Rabbi Kahane maintains that the State of Israel's foreign policy should include its role as the guardian of all Jews throughout the world. The government must realize that there are no permanent allies for Israel among the other nations. Jewish interests come first, no matter what the world may say. He wrote: The great tasks of our day are ... to define clearly and precisely the purpose and destiny of the Jewish people.... Our State must not seek merely to be like all the rest, but a distinctively Jewish one. The Jewish people stands or falls on the knowledge that it is NOT like other people... A review of the book by Rabbi Isaac L. Swift states that it shows "a serious mind grappling with problems of serious magnitude." 19 Professor Arnold Ages noted that Rabbi Kahane's "candor on the question of the Arabs in Israel is refreshing.... Kahane feels that Israel's future depends ultimately on the spiritual regeneration of the Israelis.... If this return to mitzvah Judaism is not accomplished, there is a danger that Israel's people will slip into the quagmire of leftist ideology which inevitably saps the life of a nation." The evaluation in Kirkus Reviews began: "When it comes to righteous wrath, Moses has nothing on Rabbi Kahane. The militant leader of the Jewish Defense League damns the "assimilationist rot" contaminating both young Israeli leftists and the children of Jews in the Diaspora. Strident and uncompromising, he hammers away at his fundamentalist precepts: divine ordinance guides Jewish destiny.... The Arabs are bent on the destruction of Israel; not an inch of the territory conquered in 1967 must be surrendered: only armed might can insure the political survival of the Jewish state." Ever since reading Ha'etgar, I've been amazed as events have proven, over and over, the extent of your foresight. You have a lot to contribute to the Israeli scene, if only as a catalyst.... It may take a while to get used to the Israeli mentality, but you have definitely touched a responsive chord. ... Besides the general need for spreading Jewish values, I think the most important problem you could tackle now is, once more, the problem of "Who is NOT a Jew" - the question of Arab residents of the State of Israel and your program for its solution.... The best thing is to take one issue and get people first to think about it.... Stepping on toes, even intellectual ones, gets action - You've already proven that. Choice, a journal for librarians, stated simply: ... This slim volume presents Kahane's views in their bluntest expression. He believes the Emancipation to have been a failure, trusts only Jewish self-defense, and predicts a coming wave of anti-Semitism in the U.S. Repudiated by the government of Israel and by large sectors of American Jewry, Kahane yet deals with real problems and issues.
About the Author: Rabbi Meir Kahane was born in New York City in 1932. He studied at the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn and was ordained in 1956. The same year, he completed New York Law School and later received a Masters degree in International Relations from New York University. After serving as a congregational rabbi, he found the Jewish Defense League in 1968 to combat anti-Semitism. Concerned about the alienation and assimilation of Jewish youth, Rabbi Kahane spent two decades touring American college campuses, exhorting Jewish students to learn about Judaism, make Aliya to Israel, and to stand up proudly as Jews. In 1970 he spearheaded a campaign of Jewish activism which led to the emigration of tens of thousands of oppressed Jews from the Soviet Union. He entered the political arena in Israel when he made Aliya in 1971, and was a member of the Knesset in Israel from 1984 to 1988. He authored several best-selling books, including Never Again, Why Be Jewish and The Story of the Jewish Defense League. His widely-read columns appeared weekly in the Jewish Press from 1961 to 1990.