Imagine you and your friends love to play a game, but you have different ideas about the best way to play it.

A long time ago, a group of Jewish people called Hasidim decided they wanted to pray and show their love for God in a very happy, emotional way. They liked to sing loudly, dance, and focus on feeling close to God with their hearts.

Another group of Jewish people looked at this and said, "Wait a minute, we don't think that is the right way." They believed the most important way to show love for God was to sit down, be quiet, and study holy books very deeply with their brains.

Because they disagreed, people called them the Misnagdim, which is a big word that simply means "The People Who Disagree" or "The Opposers."

So, a Misnagid is someone who prefers to focus on quiet studying and following the rules exactly, rather than the loud singing and dancing.

Today, both groups get along much better, but back then, it was just a big disagreement about whether it is better to serve God mostly with a happy, dancing heart or a deep, thinking brain!

The leader who started the Misnagdim group was a very famous and smart rabbi named Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman. Because he was so wise, everyone called him the Vilna Gaon, which means the “Genius of Vilna” (the city where he lived).

He was so dedicated to studying that stories say he only slept for two hours a night so he wouldn’t waste any time!

How They Study Holy Books Today:

The Vilna Gaon taught his students a special way to learn that people still use right now:

The Main Book:They spend most of their time studying a massive library of Jewish law and stories called the Talmud.

The Study Partner: Instead of studying alone, they sit across from a partner called a chavrusa.

The Loud Classroom: They study in a giant room filled with hundreds of people called a Beis Medrash. It is not quiet like a school library! Everyone is talking, arguing, and debating the books out loud with their partners.

Brain Power: They focus on logic and memory, trying to understand every single rule perfectly.

#jdlusa #judaism

The Kotzker Rebbe left behind no written books, preferring radical truth, deep introspection, and spoken wisdom recorded by his followers. His perspective on the transition of death aligns with core Hasidic ideas reframed through his unsparing, honest lens:

The Next Room: Death is merely a doorway between spaces, implying that the spiritual home we build here prepares us for the next room.

Ego Even at the End: True to his relentless fight against pretense, tradition records warnings that even on one's deathbed, the human ego (the internal thief) tries to orchestrate a holy exit—such as reciting final prayers loudly just to be remembered as a saint.

The Broken Heart: While speaking of the human condition and the pain of loss, he taught that “there is nothing so whole as a broken heart,” acknowledging that fully enduring the pain and fractures of life is the only authentic way to approach the Divine.

#kotzkerrebbe #jdlusa

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel viewed death not as an absolute defeat, but as the ultimate self-dedication to the divine, an act of gratitude, and a mirror that gives true meaning to human life. His reflections emphasize living with wonder and treating mortality as a reciprocal offering to God for the gift of existence.

Death as Self-Dedication:

Heschel viewed death as a profound act of gratitude and reciprocity for the gift of life, framing it as the ultimate giving of oneself back to the divine. He argued that life’s meaning is only fully understood in the context of mortality. He also famously suggested that "one ceases to live when they lose their sense of surprise", noting his own daily wonder at the sunshine.

Rather than a defeat, he regarded death as an arrival or conclusion that reflects how one has lived.

#rabbiheschel #jdlusa

Rabbi Kahane’s legal troubles were largely manufactured or tied to the actions of others acting in the name of the JDL. The one time he served prison time in the United States, it is our firm belief at JDL USA that he took a fall for a lower-ranking Jew in the organization—someone who simply could not afford the lifelong consequences of a criminal record. He protected his people even at personal cost.

Our own Rabbi Nachum Shifren, who studied directly under Rabbi Kahane, continues to speak of him with the highest regard. Check Rabbi Shifren’s bio on Substack—you will see Rav Kahane listed prominently as a formative influence.

As Rabbi Kahane himself responded to the “racist” accusation: People accuse us of thinking Jews are the best. We say yes—but anybody can become a Jew.

The systematic marring of his name was the work of leftist journalists, writers, and liberal forces embedded in both the U.S. and Israeli establishments. They needed to neutralize a voice that called for unapologetic Jewish power.

After October 7th and years of escalating anti-Jewish violence from pro-Palestine forces, it is time for Jews everywhere to re-examine what we’ve been told about Rabbi Kahane. Was it gaslighting? Or perhaps an outright lie designed to weaken our resolve to reclaim our homeland fully, according to our true traditions?

Look around. People believe Jews first arrived in Israel in 1948. That Hebrew was invented in the 20th century. When you see such obvious historical falsehoods accepted as fact, ask yourself: Have you been brainwashed too?

- Have you been brainwashed to believe there is such a thing as “Kahanism” rather than simply proud Jews embracing the Torah?

- Have you been brainwashed to believe that standing up for the Jewish people is racist?

- Have you been brainwashed to think Arabs are a race rather than an ethnolinguistic group, or that Muslims are a race rather than an ethnoreligious cult?

- Have you been brainwashed to believe the two-state solution wasn’t already tried in 1947 with the creation of Jordan and Israel?

- Have you been brainwashed to accept the myth of a distinct “Palestinian” people instead of Arabs living in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria?

- Have you been brainwashed to believe the JDL is a terrorist group, even though it's not listed as such and anyone involved in genuinely problematic actions was either expelled or had already left the group?

- Have you been brainwashed to believe that fighting back is somehow “not the Jewish way”?

Undo the brainwash.

Read the books available at books.thejdl.us , starting with Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews by Rabbi Meir Kahane, The Jewish Fist by Naamah Devine (with foreword by Rabbi Nachum Shifren), and the Katav Magazine omnibus. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@jewishdefenseleagueofficial

If you want to stand up and make a real difference for your fellow Jews, join JDL USA today.

The following history provides essential perspective on the development and necessity of the Jewish Defense League and myths that should be dispelled.

The Early Days of the Jewish Defense League

In the late 1960s, New York City was a pressure cooker of ethnic tensions, crime, and bureaucratic indifference. Rabbi Meir Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in this environment not as an abstract ideological project, but as a direct response to the immediate suffering of working-class and poor Jews. Many Jewish neighborhoods were under siege from rising street crime and violence, while city anti-poverty programs systematically excluded Jews. The municipal government refused to recognize Jews as a minority community deserving of targeted assistance. Instead, Jews with light skin were simply categorized as “white” and told they did not qualify for the same support extended to other groups. Rabbi Kahane and the early JDL fought relentlessly to secure these resources for Jewish families, exposing the hypocrisy of a system that punished Jews for not fitting neatly into the emerging racial grievance framework.

Rav Kahane understood that Jewish identity is not a matter of skin color or convenience. It is a covenantal, historical, and spiritual reality rooted in Torah, peoplehood, and shared destiny. He would be deeply ashamed today to see so many Jews eagerly claiming “white” identity on census forms, college applications, or in social discourse simply because they have lighter skin. This self-erasure plays directly into the hands of those who wish to strip Jews of our distinct minority status when it suits them—denying us protections while still holding us collectively guilty for every historical grievance against “whiteness.” Rabbi Kahane warned against this assimilationist trap from the beginning. He saw Jews abandoning their unique identity as the first step toward vulnerability and eventual betrayal of our mission in this world.

The JDL’s earliest activism was therefore as much about Jewish dignity and honest self-definition as it was about physical self-defense. By demanding fair treatment as Jews—not as generic whites—Rabbi Kahane laid the foundation for a movement that refused to let external authorities define who we are or what we deserve. That fight continues today with JDL USA.

The very first organized action of what would become the Jewish Defense League took place on Halloween night in 1968. Rabbi Meir Kahane gathered a group of young Jewish men to stand guard over a Jewish cemetery in New York that had been repeatedly desecrated. Year after year, vandals had smashed headstones, littered the grounds, and even used the sacred space as a parking lot for their rowdy Halloween antics. Enough was enough. Instead of waiting for the police—who had proven indifferent—the Rabbi mobilized these young Jews, armed with baseball bats and chains, to physically protect the resting place of their ancestors.

That night marked the birth of a new Jewish attitude: no more passive acceptance of disrespect. No more relying on others to safeguard what was holy to our people. Those young men stood watch, deterred the desecrators, and sent a clear message that Jewish graves and Jewish honor would no longer be treated as fair game. This humble act of self-defense in a New York cemetery was the seed from which the entire Jewish Defense League grew. It embodied Rabbi Kahane’s core teaching—Jews must protect Jews when no one else will. That spirit of proactive, unapologetic defense remains at the heart of JDL USA today.

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