Anti-Zionists love masks, from menacing N-95s to human-rights rhetoric that camouflages their Jew-hatred. Case in point: Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, an anti-Zionist screed hiding behind a thought-provoking analysis of American Jewry.
Leifer is enjoying a sales surge by appearing shocked, shocked, that anyone would have dared to cancel his Brooklyn book launch on the grounds that he was going to be interviewed by a leftist rabbi who identifies as a Zionist. While riding this wave, and in his book, Leifer downplays how central the Jew-hating he condemns is to the pro-Palestinian cause he champions. But the lesson of the cancellation still stands: Efforts to demonize Israel, the Jewish state, and Zionism, meaning Jewish nationalism, will inevitably spill over onto any and every Jew.
What Tablets Shattered demonstrates is just how hard it is to love the Jewish people while hating the state most Jews love and where nearly a majority lives. Leifer’s autobiographical riffs tracing his Jewish journey provide us with a tortured portrait of a neutered, would-be un-Jew.
That is unfortunate because his book has much to teach. Integrating his family saga with American Jewry’s rise, Leifer recounts how the Eastern European migrants made it. Using sweat and smarts, most of the 2 million Jews reaching the goldene medina from 1880 to 1924 built safe, golden, American lives while helping America shine.
Leifer identifies three pillars to this 20th-century success story: Americanism, by living the American dream; Zionism, by supporting Israel as a defining passion and not just a political cause; and liberalism, by expanding liberties while empowering individuals.
He then knocks each one down.
Today many believe that America and that Jewish America have vanished. Born “in the mid-1990s,” Leifer is freshest in recounting his generation’s despair and how it has shaped progressive Jews and American Judaism. “I came to awareness of the broader world, and of America,” he writes, “only after the skies had darkened” on September 11. The “2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the election of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic” followed, amid “the ever-worsening climate disaster.”
And, along the way, as many Jews’ stock portfolios soared, their souls withered. A religious Jew dazzled by his wife’s ultra-Orthodox family, Leifer notes how decade by decade, “self-gratification and individual preference…supplanted commandedness and commitment to community.”
These radicalizing experiences honed a tendency to catastrophize. Leifer claims the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre “ended any last illusions about America’s exceptional goodness”—thus ignoring the mass denunciations coast to coast of a single bigot’s crime. Moreover, under Donald Trump, “America began to appear … monstrous,” while “the reality of anti-Black violence” spread a “deep pessimism about the American project.”
Young progressive Jews began defining themselves as “victims in America, threatened by the same right-wing, ethnonationalist forces that threatened Black and brown people.” A “new kind of Jewish politics” returned many assimilated Jews back to the trappings of Judaism. Some protesters chanted in Hebrew and Yiddish. Those who engage in these “public displays of Jewishness,” Leifer explains, “perform dis-assimilation” and reject their parents’ accommodationist “consensus” while distancing themselves from “ordinary American whiteness.”
Leifer sees American Judaism escaping its denominational handcuffs. He thinks it’s moving far beyond Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox. He explores new forces, including the Yeshiva scene in New Jersey’s Lakewood shtetl and Svara, a “radically traditional yeshiva” teaching Talmud through “the lens of queer experience.” These are interesting portraits, and Leifer may be on to something; in some sense, the daily practice of Judaism is always undergoing some form of transformation from generation to generation.
Yet, when writing about Zionism and Israel, this seemingly sophisticated journalist and history student reverts to his “volatile adolescent” self, threatening to “burn [his] personal belongings on the front lawn” to “protest” his parents’ Zionism. This dogged researcher who artfully re-creates 20th-century American Jewish culture and politics is incapable of providing anything but a wildly inaccurate and jaundiced history of Israel.
He mentions Israel’s “founding,” the Six Day War, and the Yom Kippur War without mentioning Arab exterminationism or attacks. The words “Islamism,” “jihadism,” and “terrorism” don’t appear in the book’s index. He treats the Oslo Accords as “a blueprint for the permanent subjugation of the Palestinians,” and the bloody second intifada as “an armed Palestinian uprising…an explosion of rage born of decades of oppression and occupation” that paranoid Jews unfairly dismissed as “a paroxysm of antisemitic violence.” Israel’s 2005 total disengagement from Gaza, which ultimately led to Hamas’s stockpiling lethal weapons, was a “feigned retreat.” Since then, out of sheer “ethnonational” spite, apparently, Israel keeps bombing Gaza periodically.
Seeing only Israeli violence and American Jewish slavishness, Leifer deems Zionism a “bellicose nationalism” that has degenerated “into a near-fascistic militarism.” Reflecting the classic parochial assumption of intellectuals that everyone thinks like them, he often exaggerates how negatively Israel’s “image” was “transformed” in “the American mind.” Most polls consistently show overwhelming American and American Jewish support for the Jewish state.
This fanatic anti-Zionism weakens Leifer’s prescriptive “Four Paths or the Future of American Jewish Life.” His first, “The Dying Establishment,” exaggerates organizational Jewry’s centrality and toxicity. His “Prophetic Protesters” only “account for a statistically small segment of American Jews.” What he calls “Neo-Reform” is too idiosyncratic, too “calibrated to mainstream American culture,” and thus at perpetual “risk of getting lost” in hipster trends. Finally, “Separatist Orthodoxy” remains marginal (and more Israel-centered than he admits).
It’s unfortunate that with his rooted yet rebellious approach to Zionism, Leifer didn’t “do the work,” as his generation likes to say, to develop a fifth, Zionist path that might have synthesized and updated Americanism, liberalism, and Zionism. Israel and Jewish peoplehood remain the most powerful unifying forces for the American Diaspora, and some version of them more palatable to him—call it Liberal Zionism, Social Justice Zionism, Birthright Zionism, Identity Zionism, whatever—could have filled the bill.
The point is that Zionism has shown the potential to provide the grounding in reality that Leifer and so many young Jews crave. Especially after the judicial protests in Israel and the response among Jews worldwide to October 7, Zionism offers unity without uniformity, a big enough tent to incorporate anti-occupation leftists and pro-Netanyahu rightists. It fights Jew-hatred proudly, unapologetically. And it responds to Leifer’s “Diasporic Double Bind,” the fact that “as long as the state of Israel exists, American Jews will find themselves pulled within its orbit,” thereby defining their Judaism as Zionist, or, like a small, very vocal minority, anti-Zionist.
Confronting these complexities would have made the book richer and might have soothed Leifer’s soul. He needs that healing, because the October 7 bloodbath and his anti-Zionist allies’ Jew-hatred—expressed so freely after the slaughter and wounding of thousands—horrified him as it did so many of us. That leaves him, like so many on the left seeking to undo today’s core Jewish consensus intertwining Judaism and Zionism, languishing, anguishing, and increasingly alone.
In 2010, Peter Beinart claimed that young Jews were being unjustly forced to “check their liberalism at Zionism’s door.” Hamas, the academic intifada, and Tablets Shattered prove the opposite is true: Progressives keep checking their liberalism, Americanism, and commitment to nuance at anti-Zionism’s door.
Photo: Getty Images
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