Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
By Joshua Leifer (Dutton)

In late summer, a Brooklyn bookstore canceled a discussion of Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered at the last minute because the event’s moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, founder of a group for unaffiliated Jews called Brooklyn Jews, was “a Zionist.”

Never mind that Bachman does not shy away from criticizing Israel; his belief in a Jewish state was enough to convince the bookstore manager to clamp down on free speech.

The irony is that the bookstore’s decision prevented a public discussion of a book that is highly critical of Israel and its centrality to American Jewish life. Tablets Shattered is part history, part personal rumination, part sociological forecasting.

Leifer, who has worked as an editor and journalist for left-wing publications such as Jewish Currents, intersperses the story of his personal history with an analysis of the 20th century American Jewish experience. Born in 1994, Leifer grew up, he writes, in a “mainline affiliated community” in New Jersey, where he attended a Jewish day school through sixth grade. He puts it this way: “At home as in school, Judaism and Zionism were synonymous. I had no sense of where one ended and the other began.”

As a teenager, he began questioning this pairing—and after he attended college and became a journalist, his adolescent rebellion blossomed into full-fledged activism over his perspective on Israel’s activities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Leifer, who conducted more than 100 interviews for Tablets Shattered, has few positive things to say about the American Jewish experience. In his eyes, that experience was largely a capitulation to capitalism’s “coercive power” that made American Jews forget their faith and community. With more than a tint of nostalgia, he writes: “Fully joining the American project entailed the suppression and surrender of what had been the dominant forms of eastern European Jewishness: traditionalist Orthodoxy and left-wing Yiddish radicalism.”

Leifer is no less critical of the centrality that Zionism and Israel came to play in American Jewish life, particularly after the 1967 Six-Day War. Leifer is more than a generation too young to have lived through the excitement of Israel’s victory. What he knows instead are the forces of “religious messianism, or Zionist zeal at fever pitch” the war unleashed that “elevated the modern nation-state of Israel to religious significance” as well as the territorial issues of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip he witnessed as a journalist.

Still, as someone who lives part time in Israel, he remains committed to what he calls the Jewish “struggle” with Zionism and the State of Israel.

Leifer’s prognosis for American Jews is bleak: In his telling, Israel and Zionism unified Jews during the
latter part of the 20th century, but that collective purpose, he believes, is waning.

He sketches out several possible future paths for American Jewry. This includes pessimism for a dying American Jewish organized world, which he sees as “dominated by big donors and, at the same time, more detached from the lives of most American Jews.” He holds out a little more hope for what he calls “neo-Reform Judaism,” whose “ritual innovators and radical experimenters” are updating Jewish religion and tradition for the next generation, and for the left-wing Jewish protest movement that has been critical of Israeli policies—organizations like IfNotNow—which “did not confine their Judaism to the synagogue but brought it with them into the streets.” He has even more optimism for what he calls “separatist Orthodoxy”—the communities that make up the haredi world, which he sees as robust and centered on obligation and mutual aid.  “Today’s ultra-Orthodox,” he writes, “are, in this sense, survivors twice over: first of the Nazi mortal threat, then of the liberal capitalist culture on American shores.”

Tablets Shattered has its flaws. Its tone, at times, is suffused with youthful righteousness: Leifer’s depiction of the failed 2000 Camp David peace talks—he blames Israel alone for the talks’ collapse—feels one-sided. As a result of these weaknesses, many readers committed to Zionism and the American Jewish world will be tempted to dismiss this book. Such a cursory dismissal would miss the mark.

Despite those flaws, this is a passionate, clearly written and argued book by a candid young intellectual
who cares deeply about the Jewish future. He has a complex Jewish identity (Leifer himself married into an ultra-Orthodox family) and is highly critical of the Jewish left’s response to the October 7 massacre, which he finds callous, writing that too many were unable to mention the hostages or mourn the deaths of fellow Jews.

American Jews, particularly those who care about the younger generation, will ignore this book at their own peril. Tablets Shattered deserves the attention that the Brooklyn bookstore was unwilling to give it.

Peter Ephross, the editor of Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players, is a longtime writer about the Jewish world.