2025-08-20
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Hi, my name's David Wolfe, and I'm the editor of The Guardian Long Read.
Over the summer, we'll be picking a few of our favourite pieces of the year so far,
and giving you a bit of background information about them.
So this week I've chosen Kahana's Ghost,
How a Long-Dead Extremist Rabbi Continues to Haunt Israel's Politics, by Joshua Leifer.
The piece is an extremely powerful account of the rise of the far-right in Israel over the past 50 years.
through the lens of this extraordinarily colourful and grotesque figure, Meir Kahane,
who was killed in 1990, but whose influence has only grown since his death.
As Josh writes in the piece,
30 years ago Kahane was the name of a man who most thought would be forgotten.
Today, Kahanism is the governing coalition's operational ideology.
Perhaps the thing that surprised me most about the piece actually relates less to Israel itself than to the rest of the world.
Namely,
how much of Kahana's approach anticipated the kind of political arguments that we're dealing with more and more everywhere in the world today.
The way Kahana sold himself as an outsider, hated by the ruling elites,