Aesthetics of Collapse: Kahanists and Meshichistin

Miami Beach. 8 p.m. I’m sitting under the stage lights at a JCC, already weary, realizing I’d been slotted into a lineup built for zingers—shallow talking points delivered in ninety-second bursts, dressed up as discourse. I’m mentally triaging my talking points while nursing a quiet anxiety and disdain for a format that demands serious proposals to compete with emotionally manipulative outbursts—like Israeli educational access and “Who wants another October 7^th?” are somehow supposed to exist in the same conversation. Election integrity… pluralism—ugh, they’re going to hate that… maybe discourse, but educated discourse?…no, that sounds elitist…

I’m running different versions through my head, trying to land on one that doesn’t make me sound like an out-of-touch dreamer, when I hear:

“…and that is why I wear this color — it’s for Gush Katif and what we lost in 2005.”

I lean my entire body in his direction for the first time. My fellow panelist is wearing an audaciously orange sport coat, so flamboyant it’s almost absurd I hadn’t noticed it until now. I must have walked right past him, too entrenched in my own thoughts to register the visual statement he was making. Without the explanation, I would’ve assumed he chose the color to match his bold personality. This is Florida: subtlety is not one of our defining characteristics.

Now, finally present, I hear his words for what they are: grief, pride, protest.

The sartorial alarm of the sport coat stayed with me, as did the presence of the man who wore it. It wasn’t apparent to me yet, but this color—loud, insistent, and emotionally charged—would become the unifying thread connecting protest, grief, and the ideological collapse now unfolding. What we fail to name in its aesthetic infancy—color, gesture, tone—too often becomes ideology. And once ideology is visualized, it rarely stays fringe.

After October 7th, orange became our symbol of mourning for those beautiful, ginger-haired brothers, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, z”l. When we learned of their murder, we flooded our profiles with orange squares—not performatively, but desperately, hoping the world would stop scrolling long enough to care that “the resistance” had murdered two of our children. In our grief, we turned them into the embodiment of our vulnerability to exist in the world as Jews.

Unlike how we used orange to mourn the Bibas brothers’ humanity—made vivid in a world that wanted to erase them—orange, when worn by Gush Katif protestors in 2005, wasn’t chosen for its symbolic preciousness, but rather for its ability to be immediately legible on film. Protestors reached for its visibility to pop in aerial shots and stand out through the dust, the IDF uniforms, the grief. Orange wasn’t a sacred color; it was a media strategy — the visual aesthetic of dissent.

Cut to Sunday morning. I’m lazily scrolling through social media from bed. My feed is full of clips and photos from the disastrous Itamar Ben Gvir visit to 770 a few days earlier—Chabad Headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I knew about the visit—I’d signed the petition to cancel it, along with thousands of other Jews across the country.

We know what these visits look like: smug photo ops, shouting matches, a flurry of media coverage, and the inevitable impression that this is what Israel stands for in 2025. Although this one felt different. Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir often share a platform—they are both far-right, both assert ideological authority—but they move through the world differently. Smotrich carries himself with a kind of messianic containment, as if fulfilling prophecy from within the structure: government, Torah, bureaucracy. Ben Gvir wants the power without the scaffolding. His politics are a chaotic flex—built for spectacle, not continuity. Occasionally, these men converge, but they emerge from different urges: one to sanctify the system, the other to detonate it.

What was unexpected was the response from the mob on Kingston Avenue. Young men chased a woman, originally believed to be a protestor, taunting her with threats of rape and violence as she was escorted by police. Men in black suits and hats — the most recognizably Jewish among us—chanted “Mavet la’Aravim” (Death to Arabs), while kicking and throwing objects in her direction.

Most of us watched the footage with sick, helpless anguish, knowing we had to call this what it was: a chilul Hashem.

For all the work we do to give Zionism moral shape, scenes like this undo it in an instant.  Especially now when the world is watching. But when movements fail to guard their aesthetics they leave room for extremists to define them instead.

This is not Chabad as I have known it.

There’s a term most American Jews have likely never heard, even if they are familiar with Chabad: Meshichistin.

When I first encountered the word, I assumed it was Yiddish — it looks completely unfamiliar in Hebrew. Take Moshiach (messiah) and add -istim (the Hebrew suffix for professions or ideologies). You get Moshiachistim — and then, with American Ashkenazi pronunciation, it softens into Meshichistin: essentially, “Messiah-ists.”

When the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, z”l, died in 1994 (a controversial statement in itself), a faction within Chabad, now known as Meshichistin, went into overdrive. They launched lawsuits over Chabad real estate, infiltrated yeshivas, and fought for control of Chabad’s branding and messaging.

To be clear: the Rebbe was one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century. A visionary who rebuilt global Jewish identity in the shadow of the Shoah, he sent emissaries to every corner of the world to make sure no Jew, no matter how far, was ever alone again. He believed in action, education, and redemption—not coercion or chaos.

But the Meshichistin couldn’t accept his death. They declared him the messiah—not  metaphorically, but literally. They began chanting “Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu v’Rabbeinu Melech HaMoshiach L’olam Va’ed” (Long live our master, teacher, and rabbi, King Messiah, forever and ever), a slogan that now serves as both creed and liturgy.

The yellow flag with the blue crown and the red words “Moshiach Now!” is their banner. It’s not neutral within the community. It’s Meshichistin propaganda—a symbol of ideological rupture parading as continuity.

To the outside world, the flag has become iconic: a visual shorthand for Chabad outreach, joy, messianic optimism. It flutters from mitzvah tanks and floats in parades. But inside the Chabad community, it tells a very different story.

Mainstream Chabad leadership has long walked a delicate line. They do not endorse the “Yechi” slogan or the belief that the Rebbe is still physically alive, but they rarely confront it outright. They tolerate the yellow flag at informal events, especially where young bochurim are involved, but avoid it in official settings. They allow the Meshichistin to chant and wave their banners in public, and then distance themselves quietly when asked to explain. Yet the flag endures—bright, bold, and loud — because Chabad, for all its discipline, has never known how to fully contain its zealots.

In 2024 at a UCLA campus encampment, a local newscaster scanning the crowd caught sight of something unexpected: the yellow “Moshiach Now!” flag. Confused, he tried to sound it out live on air: “Mo– Mo– Moshee–ash? I’ve never seen that flag flying…I’m very curious about what that is.”

We all laughed because you don’t need to be curious about Chabad—a Chabadnik will find you. On a street corner in New York, in an airport, at a music festival, and yes—even at a campus protest against Israel. The absurdity wasn’t that the flag was there. The absurdity was that of course it was there. Because wherever there are Jews, Chabad is there, too. And sometimes, so are the Meshichistin.

The Meshichistin, for all their fire, are not the Rebbe’s rightful heirs. They cling to his image while abandoning his deep moral architecture. Their movement draws in young men with little to do and a lot of rage to burn. They roam Kingston Avenue, harassing Jews and non-Jews alike. To them, secular authority is failure made manifest, and democracy’s collapse only confirms what they already believe: that redemption awaits only with the Rebbe’s return.

What emerged around the Rebbe wasn’t just theology, but an entire visual language. Colors long associated with royalty and redemption—red, yellow, royal blue—began to appear with greater frequency. The yellow flag, emblazoned with a blue crown and the red words “Moshiach Now!” emerged before the Rebbe’s death, signaling a shift from reverence to apotheosis.

Around the same time, another man was being venerated in death: Meir Kahane. Assassinated in 1990, Kahane became a martyr for a growing cult of militant Jewish supremacy. His image—often shown with clenched fists, glaring eyes, or a raised Torah—was stylized into black and red iconography: resistance and blood.

Where the Meshichistin wrapped their messianism in royal hues and denial of death, Kahane’s cult embraced blood, militancy, and a theology of revenge. His followers did not mourn in silence, but rather with fury.

In both movements, the Oslo Accords revealed a deeper heresy: secular Zionism no longer served redemption—it stood in its way. For the Kahanists, the only solution was to topple the prevailing order. For the Meshichistin, it became a call to sanctify the land through Chabad’s emissary network by sending newly married couples into the settlements as living declarations of divine claim. Martyrdom and color became their shared rallying cry.

Gush Katif was the breaking point leading to the convergence of the movements. The 2005 Gaza Disengagement, with images of Jews dragged from their homes by secular state forces, became the defining visual trauma of a generation, and thus, the color orange became the unifying color of resistance.

In this moment, the ideological boundaries blurred. Both movements saw the state as lost and redemption as something to be reclaimed—by force if necessary. What had once been separate ideologies began to intertwine. Meir Kahane’s autobiography was re-released with an orange cover—fusing the martyrdom of the past with the betrayal of the present. Kahanists co-opted the iconic yellow of the “Moshiac Now!” flag, while Meshichistins swapped in orange and layered clenched fists and Kahanist slogans onto Yechi propaganda. Orange was no longer just protest—it had become a semiotic bridge between messianism and militancy.

After October 7th, the merger was no longer latent—it erupted. The Meshichistin had already been borrowing from Kahanist aesthetics, but now they leaned into them without restraint. The entire world was a threat, including Jews who stood in the way. If violence could be reframed as necessary for the protection of Jewish life, then the Kahanist playbook became not just defensible, but divinely sanctioned. “Moshiach Now!” had become a cry for divine order through Jewish power—not in place of it. And orange, once a protest, now carried the full emotional weight of a war for survival.

Now, in 2025, we are watching proud Kahanists emerge in mainstream Jewish spaces—not with shame or subtext, but in full view: in Chabad, in political platforms, on World Zionist Congress slates. Ill-informed Jewish influencers who built income streams on the backs of the hostages and the pain of war are now platformed by Jewish institutions already infiltrated by this ideology. There is no winking nor coded language anymore. Just an unblushing embrace of a man whose ideology was so extreme that he was banned from the Knesset for inciting racism and violence.

This is what happens when we fail to confront the aesthetics of extremism while they’re still wrapping themselves in legitimacy. If we don’t call it out—if we keep dismissing the convergence of orange flags and Yechi slogans on Kahanist materials as fringe noise — it will continue to metastasize, as we saw last week at 770.

This isn’t a condemnation of Chabad, but rather a loving critique of its blind spots. The movement that once reintroduced Jews to joy, to mitzvot, to learning, to the heart of Judaism—that same movement is now at risk of allowing its platforms, aesthetics, and institutions to be hijacked by those who worship power over peoplehood. If we do not rein in the Meshichistin, their fusion with Kahanist ideology will redefine how global Jewry sees Chabad—and, by extension, how the world sees Zionism.

If we do not fight this, we will wake up in a world where yellow and orange don’t mean messianic hope or Jewish grief; they will mean ideological collapse dressed in flags, and by then, it will be too late.