MESSIAH MODE Rise of the Jewish Far-Right by David Sheen | coming in 2026 from Or Books

Support for Jewish holy wars to expel others and expand to other lands is more popular than ever in Israel and around the world, thanks to the disciples of Brooklyn-born arch-racist Rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1972, Kahane became the first Israeli politician to openly call for ethnically cleansing the whole country of Palestinians. Kahane was shot to death in 1990, and a decade later the same fate befell his son and successor. The messianic movement they inspired, however – colloquially called Kahanism – remains at the vanguard of Israel’s monarchist camp, the farthest-right faction of the Jewish community that seeks to enslave and exterminate non-Jews. Over the decades, Kahane’s acolytes have been the most murderous of these monarchists, inciting race riots across Israel and inspiring dozens of lone-gun assassins. Meir Kahane did not emerge out of nowhere, though. The Jewish Defense League he founded in New York in 1968 was not the first organization of its kind; by that time, there were three other Jewish defense groups in the U.S. half a century old. Kahane and his JDL emerged as a response to those groups, and to a hundred-plus generations of Jewish leadership that preceded them. By denying the deep roots that Kahane tapped into, legacy Jewish groups minimized the danger posed by his followers, until it was took late to stop them from seizing power. In the past decade and a half, award-winning investigative journalist David Sheen has published tens of thousands of words correcting the record of Kahanist crimes; now his first full-length book reveals how these gadflies grew in influence until they became the government in Israel, shifting it into MESSIAH MODE.