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TABLETS SHATTERED

Joshua Leifer

The End of An American Jewish CCentury and the Future of Jewish Life

From esteemed journalist and scholar 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 deeply personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, all the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to falter in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will no longer be any 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 ongoing wars in the Middle East, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life as well as a sober conjecture about its future. Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the story of his own ancestry - the arrival from a Belarusian shtetl of his great-grandmother, Bessie - and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then goes on to report on the state of today's burning Jewish issues, building on interviews with those living daily across the varied fault lines of the Jewish conversation. We meet Millennial Jewish racial justice organizers trying to build new communities grounded in social action; Orthodox political activists navigating the tensions between pragmatism and ideology; 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. While often coming to radically different conclusions, all are asking the same fundamental question: What will it mean to be Jewish in a seemingly unprecedented time? As it traverses the contemporary Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, TABLETS SHATTERED also charts the universal quest to understand the increasingly divisive world we live in and 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
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Published 2024-08-20 by Dutton Books

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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 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.

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, I enjoyed every last bit of it.

Chinese (simpl.): Penguin China

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.

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.

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.