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Tablets Shattered

The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience
From esteemed journalist Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in.

Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future.
Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the arrival of his great-grandmother Bessie from a shtetl in Belarus and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then reports on the state of today’s burning Jewish issues. We meet millennial Jewish racial justice organizers, Orthodox political activists, young liberal rabbis looking to “queer” the Torah through exegesis, Haredi men learning full-time at the world’s largest yeshiva, progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism, and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews.
As it traverses today’s Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, Tablets Shattered also charts the universal quest to build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture.
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    • Kirkus

      July 1, 2024
      A damning assessment of the present and future of Judaism. Highly critical of Jewish structures, the U.S., and Israel, Leifer, a member of the Dissent editorial board, concludes the present era is "the autumn of American Jewish culture." He continues, "What is left of American Jewish culture appears to have lost its distinctiveness and its bite, devolved into mere kitsch and clich� no more Saul Bellow novels, only Seth Rogen movies." The author explains that many 20th-century Jews, escaping oppression in Europe, aligned their Jewish identity with their newfound American identity, seeing what was good for America as being good for Jews. However, Leifer argues, "American Jewish integration and upward mobility accomplished the wholesale destruction of older forms of life, organizations, languages, and cultural memory." While acculturated Jews thrived in America, many uncritically supported Zionism and the actions of the Israeli government and military, even as injustices mounted against Palestinians. The author views the current form of American Judaism as composed of a separatist Orthodoxy, a minority core of anti-establishment activists, and "a mainline affiliated Judaism sunken into indifference, satisfied with its shallowness, and unaware of the extent of its own religious ignorance." He sees Judaism in Israel as similarly tainted by its American ties, whether financial, political, religious, or military. In his view, the October 7, 2023, attacks and resulting war are culminations of geopolitical mistakes going back to the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In a work replete with personal reflections and opinions, the author does not shy away from blunt criticism of numerous politicians and personalities who have shaped his own sense of dissent and stirred the anger of fellow young progressive Jews--an anger that only grows as the present conflict continues to claim thousands of lives. In a candid, intellectual, often pessimistic book, Leifer pulls no punches.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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