When law enforcement officials disrupted a plot to assassinate a Palestinian activist in New York last month, they said the man behind it belonged to a little-known group: the J.D.L. 613 Brotherhood, an offshoot of the extremist Jewish Defense League.
The attack was averted because the man, Alexander Heifler, 26, discussed his plans to kill the activist, Nerdeen Kiswani, 31, with a member of J.D.L. 613 who was an undercover detective, the authorities said.
The disrupted plot has drawn attention to a renewed current of Jewish radicalism in New York — one that combines far-right Zionism and the obsession with masculinity that prevails in the “manosphere.”
And it sent a disturbing message to New York City: The Jewish Defense League was back.
The J.D.L., founded in New York City in 1968 by Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born Orthodox rabbi, once was a vigilante group that patrolled the streets of Jewish neighborhoods to fight antisemitism, and its members have been connected to a series of violent attacks in the United States and Israel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation described it as a terrorist group in 2001, but does not list it as such today.
It had been considered inactive for years, but has retained a vestigial presence with a base in Chicago, said an organizer for the group.
The offshoot, J.D.L. 613, was founded in 2024 by Yisrael Yaacob Ben Avraham, 42, a New Jersey man who converted to Judaism shortly before the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. He said he started the group out of admiration for Rabbi Kahane, anguish over the Oct. 7 attack and anxiety over the rise in antisemitism during the war in Gaza.
His group’s online materials also frequently address what it calls “challenges facing Jewish men today,” including antisemitism, suicide and loneliness.
It is not clear what drew Mr. Heifler, of Hoboken, N.J., to the J.D.L. 613 Brotherhood. He was charged with making and possessing Molotov cocktails and has been in jail since his arrest. His lawyer, Steven N. Gordon, declined to comment.
Both the groups in Chicago and New Jersey describe themselves as the true successor of the original movement started by Rabbi Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990. They are chronically online, using Substack blogs, podcasts and social media to promote hostility toward Palestinians and an aggressive form of Jewish self-defense and pride. Both have online footprints that may outweigh their numbers in the street.
They also sell merchandise. The Chicago group, which calls itself “a decentralized militant network,” sells a print magazine and an album of music “from Jews who refuse to bow.” The New Jersey group runs an online store that sells Jewish Defense League swag like T-shirts, coffee mugs and baby onesies.
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Ben Avraham said his goal was “making sure every Jew, young and old, can block a punch and throw a punch, and is able to get a firearm if they want to, and that they know how to use one.”
But he has condemned the actions of Mr. Heifler, who was arrested after he built eight Molotov cocktails at his apartment with the help of the undercover detective, prosecutors said. Mr. Ben Avraham, who voted for President Trump, said his group was “pro-police” and opposed to “illegal violence” because in a post-9/11 world “those things don’t work nowadays.”
He said, “It hurts the group, it hurts Zionism, it hurts Judaism.”
Despite his words, on Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp, his group posts memes exhorting followers to “embrace violence” to “make antisemites afraid again.” It tells them Jews have a religious duty to carry firearms. It shares anti-Muslim memes and makes a religious argument in favor of “a pre-emptive strike to ensure one’s safety.”
His group’s website, which was taken down after he spoke to The Times, declared its mission to be “redefining the Jewish man as strong, respectful and unwavering.”
Miriam Eve Mora, a historian at the University of Michigan who studies the J.D.L. and its appeals to masculinity, said Rabbi Kahane used similar rhetoric.
Ms. Mora said antisemitism is pervasive in the manosphere.
“But what is appealing to some young Jewish men right now is that it is men online saying ‘we are victims,’ which traditionally men who are trying to be manly don’t say a lot,” she said.
Barry Jonas, a fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism and a former federal counterterrorism prosecutor, said extremist groups have thrived online by appealing to people who have felt adrift.
“It’s guys that are longing to be part of something and make an impact on the world who don’t have the good support structure that you would hope they have,” he said. “They are literally or figuratively in the basement online all the time.”
The size of each rival J.D.L. group could not be independently verified. Mr. Ben Avraham declined to say how many people belong to J.D.L. 613, but said between 20 and 30 people attended a meeting on the night of Mr. Heifler’s arrest.
Na’amah Devine, an organizer for the Chicago group, J.D.L. USA, said her organization was “smaller and more underground than in the past,” with just 200 members nationwide. She has been highly critical of Mr. Ben Avraham, calling him “a rogue ex-member” of her group.
Rabbi Kahane’s stated goal of defending Jews from antisemitism quickly turned into something darker. He was convicted of weapons smuggling in 1971 and moved to Israel, where his views are widely echoed among today’s political right, said Shaul Magid, a professor at Harvard Divinity School who has written about him.
In America, Rabbi Kahane called for Jews to take up arms. In Israel, he called for replacing the government with one governed by religious law; expelling Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian territories; and demolishing the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, and replacing it with a Jewish temple.
He also founded the Kach party, which was banned from elections for inciting racism and considered a foreign terrorist organization by the United States until 2022. He was assassinated in New York in 1990 by a man who was later convicted of involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Members of the J.D.L. have been linked to several high-profile acts of violence.
In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born J.D.L. activist who immigrated to Israel, killed 29 people and injured 125 more at a West Bank mosque during Ramadan. And in 2005, J.D.L. members were convicted of a plot to bomb a Los Angeles mosque and an office of Representative Darrell Issa in California.
American Jewish groups have long treated Rabbi Kahane as an outcast, Mr. Magid said. But he said recent events might have created space for what he called “Kahane’s worldview” to gain traction among some American Jews.
“After the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, after Oct. 7, after a variety of other antisemitic events, I think people are starting to say, ‘Maybe he was right,’” he said.
Mr. Ben Avraham is perhaps an unlikely messenger for Kahanism.
He was raised Catholic and began to convert to Judaism during a yearslong period of drug addiction. He credits his faith with leading him to sobriety when 12 stints in rehab could not.
He read Rabbi Kahane’s works around the time of a drug overdose that left him on dialysis and unable to walk for years, he said. At rock bottom, he was moved by the “tough guy thing” in the rabbi’s writings, he said.
Ms. Devine, the J.D.L. USA organizer in Chicago, has castigated J.D.L. 613 as reckless and amateurish. She said she had tried to distance the J.D.L. image from the violence of the past.
“The fact that they would even let someone in who would consider making Molotov cocktails is ridiculous, it is insane,” she said.
The alleged plan to kill Ms. Kiswani came after years of tension between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protest groups in New York. Ms. Kiswani’s group, Within Our Lifetime, is reviled among pro-Israel activists for disruptive protests that have closed bridges and transit hubs and for inflammatory rhetoric, including support for “armed resistance” against Israel.
In an interview, Ms. Kiswani said the planned attack was “terrifying” and called on the police to investigate other members of J.D.L. 613, including others on the group chats with Mr. Heifler and the detective.
Mr. Ben Avraham, who has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing, said he was in one chat mentioned in the criminal complaint against Mr. Heifler. He said he thought the conversation ended when he rebuked Mr. Heifler for talking about Molotov cocktails.
But according to court documents, Mr. Heifler and the detective then began a series of one-on-one conversations that culminated in his arrest last month.
Mr. Ben Avraham said he thought Mr. Heifler was set up by the police and that his arrest reflected an antisemitic double standard. Why did the police arrest someone from his group and not a pro-Palestinian one?
He admits to hostile rhetoric against Ms. Kiswani, including calling her and her newborn baby “disgusting and vile scum” who do not “deserve to exist in the U.S.A.” But he said his group’s verbal attacks were not threats.
“We’re not going to be the weak Jew,” he said. “We Jews don’t turn the other cheek.”
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
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