Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews

Book Synopsis: Rabbi Meir Kahane is a member of the Israeli Knesset. According to public opinion polls, the movement he heads is gaining enormous power among Israelis, and particularly among the young. Kahane has long been a thorn in the buttocks of the wealthy and entrenched Jewish leadership. His founding of the Jewish Defense League, his demands for Jewish defense of poor and elderly Jews in the inner cities, his taking to the streets in the late '60s and his use of violence to draw international attention to the Soviet Jewish problem, have all gained him the hostility of so-called Jewish leaders. In Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews, Meir Kahane touches the most painful nerves and psyches of those Jewish liberals who would prefer to believe that Judaism and Zionism arc compatible with liberal concepts. He challenges us all with such agonizing questions as:

• If a Jewish and Zionist state was created in Israel to guarantee a homeland for Jews with a guaranteed permanent Jewish majority and Jewish sovereignty, will Arabs be allowed to peacefully and democratically become a majority and turn Israel into an Arab nation?
• If the answer is "No," isn't that a contradiction of the western democratic thesis: "one person, one vote"?
• Is Zionism, which calls for a Jewish majority, not in total conflict with Western democracy, which insists on majority rule, no matter who constitutes the majority?
• Can any Jewish leader or even an average Jew offer a young Jew any logical reason not to marry a non-Jew? Or even the slightest logical reason to insist on being a Jew rather than a "human being"?
• Is Israel a Jewish state or is it a Hebrew-speaking gentilized one whose secular youth haven't the slightest idea of what Jewishness is and who dream of living in the fleshpots of the West?
• How many Arabs will sit in the Knesset in ten years? In twenty years? Will they become a majority and vote Israel out of existence?
• Does that matter?
• Does anyone care?

These are but a few of the challenging questions Kahane asks and it is the reason Jewish leaders have tried to build mountains of antagonism against him to insure that this book is buried and that Jews do not read it. Uncomfortable questions indeed—and Rabbi Kahane offers Jewish answers. The language and the ideas are not "polite" and "temperate." He isn't following the doctrine of phoniness to "be nice" because, in the end, he is talking about a single issue: Jewish survival.