In his introduction to Meir Kahane, a "cultural biography" of the Brooklyn-based Orthodox rabbi and Jewish Press columnist who, in 1968, cofounded a paramilitary organization called the Jewish Defense League (JDL), Shaul Magid asserts that there has been an impulse to "expunge" his eponymous subject from "our narratives about American Jewish culture and history" (1, 5). This "untold chapter in the radicalism of race, ethnicity, and identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s" has been erased, Magid proposes, because historians "are embarrassed by Kahane and refuse to view him as a noteworthy figure even though until the mid- to late 1970s he was ubiquitous on the national stage" (6). To correct this, Magid charts Kahane's tumultuous public career from his early New York days to his violent death in Israel.