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

Wars to eliminate non-Jews and expand to other lands are increasingly popular amongst Israelis and their supporters, in large part due to disciples of the late Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1972, Kahane founded the first Israeli political party whose platform called to ethnically cleanse the country of Palestinians. Kahane was shot to death in 1990, and a decade later the same fate befell his son and successor. The 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 across the Middle East. Kahane’s ideology did not emerge out of nowhere, though, and neither was the Jewish Defense League he founded in New York in 1968 the first of its kind. By then 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 the hundred-plus generations of Jewish leadership that preceded them. By denying the deep roots that Meir Kahane tapped into, legacy Jewish groups minimized the danger posed by his followers, until it was too late to stop them from seizing power in Israel and the U.S. Since 2010 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.