THE MAKING OF A ZEALOT

By R.Z. Sheppard

WRATH IS CURRENTLY THE deadly sin of choice. If you were left out of the greedfest of the '80s, you can now rage against the growing gap between the haves and the have mores. If your job has gone to someone younger, prettier or darker, don't get even, get mad.

Such sociological rancor can be therapeutic. But there are historical hatreds so strongly rooted, they imprison the hater. Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (Little, Brown; 246 pages; $22.95) is the story of a young man's attempt to break from his father's inflamed obsession with anti-Semitism and its central event of this century, Hitler's Final Solution. Edgy with irony and urban humor, the book also gives a rare insider's view of an insular Jewish community that is as alien to mainstream American Jewry as it is to the rest of the country.

Autobiographer and Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi was raised on the rim of Borough Park, a section of Brooklyn then heavily populated with deeply religious Holocaust survivors and their American-born children. His father, who came from a small Hungarian village, escaped the death camps by fleeing into the forest, where he hid for a year in a 4-ft.-deep hole. Even as a successful candy wholesaler in the U.S., he felt hunted and angry, especially at the "Nice Irvings," his term for America's assimilated Jews who laughed at Borscht Belt humor and turned, as he said, "an identity we'd been martyred for into vaudeville."

In Yossi's world Philip Roth and his fictional double would be dismissed as a Jewish Amos and Andy, a contributor to "a culture of self-abasement and vulgar excess." Young Halevi's heroes were fighting Jews: the Zionist firebrands of the 1930s; the invincible Israeli army; and U.S. extremists like Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968.

Halevi looks back on his JDL activities as having been the opportunity to become "at once my father's contemporary and a Yippie." The first connection was with "the danger zone of Jewish history" and the second with "the funhouse of America." In 1972 Halevi protested the Soviet restriction of Jewish emigration by throwing chicken blood at a touring troupe of Ukrainian dancers. He was also part of a group tossed out of Moscow for demonstrating at a visa office.

In short, Halevi was less an extremist than one of the early media militants who learned to exploit the press for publicity. His literary ambitions and his eventual decision to become a journalist suggest a more moderate man's need to examine experience in a cooler light. But his sharp skills as a journalist do not always serve him well as a memoirist. The emotional temperature drops steadily as Halevi writes about his disaffection with the JDL, his marriage to a woman with a Mayflower pedigree who converts to Judaism, the birth of his children, the death of his father and, eventually, the Halevi family's immigration to Israel.

The passionate heart of the book remains the early Brooklyn years, with its accounts of fractious religious sects, wonder rabbis, drug pushers in yarmulkes selling "jointelehs," and the Jewish Press warning of a holocaust of assimilation while it supports a fund drive to circumcise Jews secretly in Russia. Why does Halevi's Borough Park jump with life while his Jerusalem seems strangely sedate? The answer can be found partly in a pithy line he wrote about his father's generation: "Where you came from is more important than where you are."