…It started with Molotov cocktails. As the ’60s curdled into the ’70s, the teenage boys of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, like many other disaffected and angry young men of the time, found the flash and heat of violence irresistible. Dressing up in their bar mitzvah suits to lob balloons filled with chicken blood at the ballerinas of the touring Bolshoi didn’t cut it anymore. They began building crude pipe bombs and exploding them at the bottom of a drained pool at Kahane’s summer camp in the Catskills. These were the kind of bombs they then placed in the doorways of the Aeroflot and Intourist offices in Manhattan in the fall of 1970, causing a minor diplomatic crisis between the superpowers. The informers and undercover police officers that swelled the ranks of the JDL were warning their superiors that something bigger and more dangerous was in the works. One officer from the NYPD’s intelligence unit who had infiltrated the group gained access to their cache of weapons, which were hidden in closets all over Brooklyn. The JDL had enough shotguns and rifles to arm a small militia.
The narcissistic, theatrical, publicity-hungry rabbi seemed barely able to control the resentful young men, many from dysfunctional backgrounds, who swam around him like parasitic fish.…