'Tablets Shattered': The uncertain future of Jewishness in the US and admiring Jewish values

In May 2006, at an event at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, marking the centenary of the American Jewish Committee, the eminent Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua contrasted the shallowness of American-Jewish identity with the robust commitment of Israelis.

“You’re playing with Jewishness – plug and play,” he declared – while decisions about politics and political economy, life and death are being made in Israel “as it was in the time of the Bible or of the Second Temple.”

Six years later, while spending a summer in Israel, teenager Joshua Leifer heard Yehoshua deliver a version of the same speech. If Israel was, indeed, “the place where Jewishness was expressed in its totality,” Leifer subsequently concluded, and the “brutal treatment of Palestinians” was an important component of that Jewishness, then that “reality was not to be celebrated but mourned.”

In Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, Leifer, a journalist, currently pursuing a PhD in the history of moral and social thought at Yale, continues to grapple with these concerns, amid the attack by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, Israel’s military response, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, along with the likely replacement of the United States as the center of gravity for Jewishness by Israel, which is expected to be home to the majority of the world’s Jews by 2050.

Days before his great-aunt Estelle died in 2023, Leifer reveals, she told him, “I disagree with every word you write.”Anguished, angry, impassioned, and deeply personal, Tablets Shattered is likely to elicit a similar response from some readers. That said, even they may concede that the book provides a probing and provocative analysis of the myriad challenges facing disaffected American Jews, who, nonetheless, like Leifer, do not want to renounce their faith, language, heritage, or Jewish identity.

The test of Jewish identity

As a Jew and political progressive, Leifer explains, he feels “pinched between great shame and great fear.” Shame at decades of occupation, military rule “over another people” and expansion of settlements that “has eroded the moral compass of Israel” and precipitated a rupture with his Zionist upbringing. Shame directed at leaders of establishment Jewish organizations in the United States who have refused to question or criticize policies of the Israeli government and made support of Israel a litmus test of Jewish identity. And fear over the implications of the rise of antisemitism that during some pro-Palestinian demonstrations has produced “cheers for Hamas gunmen, glee at the killing of Israeli civilians, and grotesque conspiracies of Jewish global control.” Acknowledging the latter reality, Leifer insists, “is wholly compatible with opposing Israeli war crimes.”

All that said, Leifer’s main concern is the past, present, and the uncertain future of Jewishness (and Yiddishkeit) in the US. Most American Jews, he notes, are descendants of immigrants who arrived in the New World between 1880 and 1924, seeking a better life than they had in their shtetls in Eastern Europe. For so very many of them, America delivered. But prosperity, physical security, political and legal rights, and the apparent disappearance of discrimination following the defeat of the Nazis exacted a price: compromises with Orthodox religious practices, working-class radicalism, ideas of solidarity, mutuality, obligation, “the meaning of mitzvah,” and the abandonment of “older forms of life, organizations, languages, and cultural memory.”

AS EARLY as the 1960s, Leifer indicates, some writers and communal leaders shared novelist Herman Wouk’s concern that Jewishness might “pleasantly vanish down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs in the back.”

Not surprisingly, then, the steady decline in synagogue attendance in the second half of the 20th century has accelerated in the 21st. More than a third of Conservative synagogues and a fifth of Reform synagogues have shut their doors. Twenty-seven percent of American Jews – and 40% of those between ages 18 and 29 – identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” As memories of the Holocaust – the main reason many American Jews give for continuing to identify as Jews – fade, Leifer emphasizes, “a crisis of meaning” is spreading.

Unwilling to renounce his membership in “our collectivity,” Leifer believes that the admittedly admirable values of liberal Judaism – inclusion, volunteerism, and pluralism – risk abandoning “the most ancient, constitutive, normative framework, without which it is unclear Jewish religious life can persist.” And that Orthodoxy, which “remains the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer,” threatens “the elements of American society – openness, tolerance, and liberalism – that have enabled religious Jewish communities to flourish” in America.

Already a kosher-keeping, synagogue-attending, rabbinical text-studying Jew, Leifer has recently become even more committed “to the radical potential of traditional Judaism.” Embracing a religion of limits and obligations, instead of infinite choice and instant gratification, he now strictly observes the Sabbath and other holy days, dons tefillin, and wears a kippah.

“Because a living community is a community that finds things worth fighting for,” Leifer has also reaffirmed his unabashedly progressive views about gender, race, and a right of self-determination for all people.

The old consensus among American Jews “was an anomaly,” Leifer maintains. “It’s not coming back.” To be sure, his idiosyncratic response – inhabiting “the border between some of the paths in Jewish life, or perhaps more accurately, at the point of their jagged intersection” – will not be embraced by the vast majority of his fellow American Jews. But, along with Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Leifer may well be right about one thing: “The very being of Judaism consists in its imposing a distinctive regime on the everyday existence of the Jew.” 

The reviewer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. TABLETS SHATTEREDTHE END OF AN AMERICAN JEWISH CENTURY AND THE FUTURE OF JEWISH LIFEBy Joshua LeiferDutton399 pages; $32