In the annals of "terrorists" with unlikely day jobs, consider the case of Lenny Goldberg, a long time follower of Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi who founded a movement of violently anti-Arab Jewish militants.
Goldberg, a somewhat geeky, soft-spoken New York Jew, recently joined about 200 of his fellow radicals -- branded "terrorists" even by Israel and the US State Department -- to commemorate Kahane's assassination by an Arab gunman in Manhattan 16 years ago.
"I have a business," Goldberg said, somewhat embarrassed, in the basement conference room of the three-star Caesar Hotel in Jerusalem.
"I rent out inflatables that kids jump on -- moon bouncers. Fortunately it's seasonal work. I'm busy in the spring and summer and then in the winter I'm free to be a Jewish terrorist."
Goldberg was being sarcastic, playing off a frequent theme of Kahane's followers: that they are wrongly persecuted as "terrorists" for their simple devotion to Torah and Israel, while the true "terrorists" -- the indigenous Palestinians -- are allowed to cling to what they say is God-willed Jewish land.
"It's the most ridiculous thing that these people are considered terrorists, but the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) isn't," says Baruch Ben Yossef, the group's lawyer, gesturing to the Jewish radicals milling about spilling sponge cake crumbs onto books for sale with titles such as "They Must Go," a 250-page creed outlining the reasons Arabs must be thrown out of Israel, by force if necessary.
It is, however, an unlikely argument. Ben Yossef himself put an Aramaic death curse on then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last year because of his plans to uproot Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Other followers of Kahane and the splinter movements that sprang up after his death have a record of violent acts far more sinister than voodoo curses.
They have claimed responsibility for dozens of shootings of Palestinians in the West Bank, including the notorious 1994 massacre of 29 worshippers at a Hebron mosque.
In April 2002, Israeli police arrested a Kahane follower in connection with a plot to leave a trailer laden with two barrels of gasoline and two gas balloons outside a Palestinian girls' school in east Jerusalem.
The actions have earned them a place on the list of terror organizations of the US and Israel.
"We strive to protect the Jews if the government isn't able to," explains Goldberg, 48. "There's the pen and the sword. We distribute books and leaflets. That's the pen."
"Then, there's the sword - other activities," he adds elusively.
Those other activities have included training attack dogs and a shadowy West Bank settler militia known as the Jewish Legion.
Those gathered for the commemoration represent a fundamentalist religious militancy in the garb of American counter culture. Like Kahane himself, most of those in attendance seem to be from Brooklyn.
The younger devotees blend New York hip-hop fashions such as baggy chinos, Nike trainers, and hooded sweatshirts with untamed beards, wool skull caps, and messianic eyes. Some wear T-shirts that read "I only buy from Jews."
The elders play acoustic medleys, with bongo drum and tambourine accompaniments. They sway back and forth and bob their heads like doped up fans at a Woodstock revival concert. Instead of a kipa, a bongo player wears a knit Rastafarian cap of the sort favored by Reggae musicians to contain unkempt dreadlocks.
But the rhetoric of these neo-hippies is a far cry from free-love and other tropes of the 1960s.
Nofia Altman, who writes a blog called Orange Prisoners of Zion, linked up with a radical batch of Kahane followers in Hebron after she grew weary of mainstream Jewry, who she says "were embarrassed about being Jewish."
"It was this you-can't-say-we're-better-than-everybody-else-kind-of-crap," she recalls of the American Jewish community she grew up in. "It was too wishy-washy for me."
The Kahane memorial was held, ironically, in the Caesar Hotel's Rabin Conference Center -- named for ex-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin loathed by Kahane followers for initiating the peace process with Palestinians. A radical Jew opposed to peace assassinated Rabin in 1994.
As they enter the hotel, attendees kiss the prayer scroll nailed to the front door, and then kick the Rabin sign.
Inside the conference room, musician and talk radio pundit Dov Shurin performs songs from his recent albums "Masters of the Land" and "Biblical Revenge." These rallying cries have become a sort of unofficial anthem for this motley band of xenophobes.
"This is a memorial for one of the greatest Jews of our time," says Shurin. "[Kahane] said we have to take the land, aggressively settle it, and settle out the enemies."
He steps up to the mike to introduce his next song.
"This is a revenge song," Shurin says before strumming into an upbeat, feel good, clap along ditty about Biblical Samson's revenge against the Philistines.
Shurin is a chain-smoking 57-year-old Brooklyn native in a black fiddler's cap with a pot belly and ragged graying beard. With his tobacco stained whiskers and a shifty half-closed left eyelid, he's more hobo than Hasidic.
"There are two kinds of racism, there's the bad Hitleristic racism and then there's the fine, chosen, Godly racism," Shurin explained before his performance.
"God chose, he chose the Jews and that's his right. That's healthy racism. The unhealthy racism is all the attacks against the Jews just for being the chosen people."
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