150	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bcame in from the alien cold to the warmth of Judaism bthrough the JDL? The ones who had known no Judaism at ball and the ones who had known the American-style bagels- band-lox brand long enough to be repelled by it. The ones bwho had never cared and the ones who had been active in bthe New Left. Consider this letter that I received from a bstudent at the University of Texas and who, to this day, I do bnot know:

b“I heard you speak in Austin last Spring amidst a growing bconsensus on my part to be involved in the New Left and bmany antiwar groups. What you did for me I will never bforget. With the emotion of everything that happened when byou spoke, my Judaism came alive and now I don’t think it bwill ever die . . . . Soon after you left we organized a bchapter of the Jewish Defense League in the hopes of mak- bing the Jews on our campus realize what was going on.”

bIn January 1971 Dov Sperling and I flew to Toronto, bCanada, to speak to the students at Toronto and York buniversities. The speeches were in connection with a bstudent-planned Soviet Jewry Week. I spoke as I always do. bThe words were the militant words of JDL, the kind that brepel the Establishment and that are branded as “un- bJewish.” The Hillel newspaper, Or (Light), ran a complete bissue dealing with the appearance, and one of the articles, bwritten by one Joe Polonsky, stated:

b“For the first time in the academic year 1970-71 I got binspired at a York forum. The occasion was a truly moving band often painfully sensible talk by Rabbi Meir Kahane of bthe Jewish Defense League. . . .

b“Perhaps the most profound effect the meeting with bKahane had on me was that for a few brief hours, I felt I was bunequivocally a Jew, a feeling which has not overly pos- bsessed me as of late. So when all the fat cat rabbis and all the b‘boy, do I have a brotherhood meeting for you’ Jewish bbusinessmen scorn the Rabbi Kahane for not being very bJewish in his approach, maybe they should take heed that bKahane managed to make their children feel more Jewish in bone hour than they managed to in twenty years. . . .”

bYet another article, by Stan Steinman, declared: “In one bshort hour he made the students aware of Jewish history in b