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Sign up todayTablets Shattered
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Learn moreFrom 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.
Joshua Leifer is a journalist, editor, and translator. His essays and reporting have appeared widely in international publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Haaretz, The Nation, and elsewhere. A member of the Dissent editorial board, he previously worked as an editor at Jewish Currents and at +972 Magazine. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University, where his research focuses on the history of modern moral and social thought.
Reviews
Praise for Tablets Shattered:"Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered is both a history of Judaism in America and a cri de coeur from a heartbroken member of the tribe."
—The New York Times, Editors' Choice
“One of the book’s strengths is its ability to corral many diverse Jewish voices. . . . Readers will leave Leifer’s book feeling that American Judaism is less a shattered tablet and more a rich tapestry with plenty of flaws and the capacity for real beauty.”
—Jewish Book Council
"Leifer has precisely limned the nature of his own predicament as a young American Jewish intellectual....[a] frequently insightful and elegantly written book."
—Jewish Review of Books
"Josh is a terrific writer, and the book is compelling and thought-provoking. I really enjoyed it."
—Benyamin Cohen, The Forward
"Whether you, dear reader, agree or disagree with Leifer, the author challenges you to think deeply about what it takes to sustain community in an era of disintegration and flux. This has been one of the central questions each Jewish generation is called to answer."
—Jewish Herald Voice
"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...book, Leifer pulls no punches."
—Kirkus
“Tablets Shattered is a cogent and compelling argument for what ails institutional Judaism and offers up four paths to fix it.”
—The Forward
“Tablets Shattered contains more wisdom, empathy, and eloquence about the past and present of Jews in the U.S. and in Israel than any other book I know. Both sobering and inspiring, it is an extraordinary work that might even help lead us to a more decent future.”
—Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and professor of history at Georgetown University
"A thoughtful and deeply felt meditation on where American Jewry has been and where it might be going. I very rarely say this, but I learned a lot, and unlike the Talmudic learning of my youth, enjoyed every last bit of it."
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
“If the drama of Jewish life is convulsion and reconstitution, now it is American Jewry’s turn, with the shattering of a century-long synthesis that gave our community its unity. In the best of Jewish traditions, journalist and scholar Joshua Leifer has emerged as an essential voice in chronicling this process and sensing its opportunities, and not just its risks. Following his own family’s story, Leifer eloquently documents that neither the centrist liberalism, nor the default Zionism, nor the exceptionalist patriotism of American Jewry’s history predetermines its future. “
—Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, and author of Liberalism Against Itself
"When I began Tablets Shattered, I was exhilarated by the pace of its journalism, the scale of its history, and the voice of its author, whose journey through Judaism, Zionism, and the Left speaks so acutely to my own. As I approached its end, I didn’t want to say goodbye to this Buddenbrooks-like tale, which has been such a companion to me as I try to make sense of the past, present, and future of American Jewry."
—Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind
“There have been many stories told of the evolution of American Jewry. Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered offers a lucid and fresh account, from a Millennial Generation perspective, deeply informed historically, prescient, impassioned, and deftly woven with autobiographical insight and humor. Many readers will find themselves in this story, and others will become aware of a new generation of American Jews; unafraid, Jewishly literate, politically engaged, and deeply committed to the Diaspora and the opportunities it presents.”
—Shaul Magid, Harvard University, and author of The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance Expand reviews
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