Joshua Leifer is a doctoral student at Yale and a journalist with a long history of writing for progressive and left-wing publications like +972 and Jewish Currents. He has recently had some public quarrels with old comrades on the left, above all about the left’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Jewish civilians. (For more on that debate, check out Leifer’s back-and-forth with historian Gabriel Winant in Dissent magazine.) His new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, is not political as much as descriptive: he asks what forms American Jewish life will take as younger Jews become less enamored of Israel and less committed to Jewish institutions, like the synagogue. Nevertheless, on Aug. 20, one of his appearances to promote the book was canceled—literally, not in the online, reputational sense—by a bookstore clerk who objected to the politics of Rabbi Andy Bachman, who was going to be in conversation with Leifer. I was Leifer’s interlocutor on Sep. 17, when he spoke at Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life. An edited, condensed transcript of our talk, unthwarted by the bookstore clerks of the world, is below.
—Mark Oppenheimer
Mark Oppenheimer: What I would like from you, Josh Leifer, is for you to tell us the narrative of this book, but starting when you’re about five years old.
Joshua Leifer: I grew up in your kind of standard suburban community, what I call “mainline, affiliated Judaism.” I think the term signifies something like a support-for-the-Jewish-Federation, going-to-day-school kind of Jewish life. I went to a Solomon Schechter [Conservative Jewish] school for the first eight years of my education. And then my parents did something sort of unconventional for their friend cohort, which is that they sent me to public school in a town in northern New Jersey that is fifteen minutes west of Teaneck and therefore on this other side of the highway where there were, like, no more Jews.
So, I came from a school where we said the Pledge of Allegiance, sang “Hatikvah”—the Israeli national anthem—and then davened [prayed] Shachris [the morning prayer service]. And then the next year I went to a school where my English teacher had an American flag picture behind her desk, with a cross of light going through it. And so very quickly I was thrown into a kind of America that was very different from the Jewish-enveloped, very Israeli environment that I grew up with.
[In high school, Leifer became, he said, “something of a leftist.”]
That had developed through mainly reading on the internet. I’m part of the lucky generation that didn’t really have social media, but had the internet, which meant that you just kept clicking on links on blogs until you discovered something really new about the world—so I was reading, for example, Israeli anarchist blogs. This happened to be the peak of the struggle against the separation barrier. I got very clued into that. And all of a sudden, I’m like, “What are the Geneva Conventions?”
[After high school, Leifer decided to take a gap year in Israel. He chose a “mechina,” or pre-army program, in Tel Aviv, where he moved in the fall of 2013. In Israel, he became active with All That’s Left, an activist group “composed of people who see their angle of operation as coming from the diaspora, but they’re on the ground in Israel/Palestine.” When he returned to the United States, he got involved in Jewish progressive activism at Princeton University, and soon became an early member of the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow.]
I went back to Israel after I graduated from college, and I worked for a publication called +972, where I reported on the ground from Israel/Palestine, spent lots of time in the occupied West Bank, and also covered the ongoing refugee crisis in south Tel Aviv. I would never have become a journalist if it wasn’t for +972, and in some ways my orienting political lens comes from +972. What I mean by that is that even when I worked at other places, I sort of saw one of my journalistic responsibilities as translating the Israeli left and the Israeli progressive lens on world affairs into English, for consumption and understanding by a wider audience. And that gives you a little bit of a sense of how I have a sort of perspective that, on the one hand, is opposed to the occupation, and horrified by Israeli human rights abuses, but is also committed to Jewish self-determination and to Jewish flourishing. The space for that kind of view has really, really narrowed over the last ten months.
MO: What does your book argue?
JL: The book came kind of sideways to me from an editor and an agent who said, “We want a book about the story of millennial disillusionment with Israel.” And initially my book proposal was very straightforward, along the lines of things that at the time I had been writing about at the magazine Jewish Currents, like the fight over who gets to represent American Jews politically on the national stage: Is it the ADL or is it someone challenging the ADL? That kind of thing. And my amazing editor read a draft of my proposal and said, “This is interesting. But the number of people who are interested in the fight over who gets to be like the voice of Jewish politics is, um, a little small. Can you make it more interesting?”
What took shape was an argument about what I call in the book “the end of the American Jewish Century.” Over the course of the twentieth century, and especially in the post-war years, most of what we know of as American Jewish identity and culture took shape. There were three primary pillars on which that consensus stood. One was Americanism—a belief held by many American Jews that America is an exceptionally good country, as confirmed by the Jewish experience. And that has to do with its freedom relative to Europe, to the old country, and also later, post-1948, and especially post-1973, with American support for Israel.
MO: Well, the rest of the world kept showing Jews how good it was to be American. In the places we’d come from, all the Jews were murdered. And then the places that didn’t murder their Jews put them all under communist rule.
JL: Exactly. And we also have this narrative of a kind of upward mobility and education. I cite Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s great line, “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a Supreme Court Justice? One generation.” So that’s pillar one: Americanism.
The second pillar was Zionism. And by Zionism, I don’t actually mean the thing that everyone’s debating right now about, you know, self-determination and a state. I actually mean the idea of Israel as a moral exemplar. I think for a lot of American Jews, Israel becomes important for their identities, because it exemplifies certain kinds of values. It comes to be seen as kind of the culmination of all of Jewish history ever.
And then the third pillar is liberalism, by which I mean liberal religion, as a way of thinking about religious observance that’s oriented around the individual as the main active agent—choice is the operative way that people engage with their religion. So it’s not, say, “I am commanded” or “This is a holistic set of mitzvahs,” but “I’m choosing to do this and I’m probably not doing other things.” And a kind of value-neutral tolerance, maybe even verging on a relativism, in which I can’t actually give reasons for why I do this and I don’t do that, and I’m also not going to judge other people for doing or not doing it. I think there are a lot of salutary and important things that the liberal approach to religion enabled American Jewish life to do. But it also made it kind of hard to sustain communities over the long run when anyone can opt out.
MO: So you had the sort of Holocaust/Zionism merger, which said, “You better stay Jewish, and here’s how to stay Jewish—support Israel.”
JL: I mean, in some ways, there’s a certain intuitive truth to it, which is there was a horrific catastrophe and the near extermination of the Jewish people. And so here is the state that is the bulwark against that happening again. And for a long time, the communal leaders invested a lot in this idea of Zionism. It became the glue of American Jewry. As Irving Howe said, “Israel and Zionism enabled American Jews to postpone that reconsideration of Jewishness which the American condition required.”
MO: In the last quarter of the book, you grapple with the fact that none of those pillars is as compelling as it used to be. The Americanism has been problematized by just sort of a general breakdown in patriotism, perhaps dissatisfaction with the current or prior presidency. Liberal religion is no longer giving people a compelling reason to stay. And, for many, Zionism has become more and more complicated. Having given the diagnosis, you talk about different paths forward. And you say there are four of them.
JL: As I saw it, yeah. The four paths forward were basically, first—and I regret calling it this—the Dying Establishment, by which I meant, the big shuls [synagogues], and the federations, and the denominations. The rabbinical schools might have very few rabbinical students these days, but they have really big endowments. These are institutions that are not going to go away. And people who want to continue to live within them can do that. And I think that there are also some virtues to them. Like they built institutions, which is something that doesn’t really happen these days anymore. And they built them with an eye to the future. But I don’t think that’s going to be a really attractive model for a lot of young people.
Another option is something that I call prophetic protest. It’s the part of the left that wants to bring ritual into protest. People who want to wear, you know, a tallis at a civil disobedience. But the question then is, what happens after the protest? Having spent time in those communities, my critique there was that there isn’t a lot of really hard thinking about what’s the place of religion when the protest ends. Is it just an instrumental kind of mobilizing rhetoric or aesthetic?
MO: I’m thinking of a friend of mine who says, “I never feel so Jewish as when I’m linking arms at a protest.” And I always think, “You never try to feel Jewish anywhere else! You don’t have seders, you don’t go to shul.”
JL: It’s real for a lot of people, a lot of people who I know and who are my friends. But I think, again, is it possible to build a sustainable community over the long term, if that’s the limit? I’m not sure. I mean, you can bring your children to the protest, but, you know, will they be able to engage with the tradition?
MO: Let me tell you, having some children, what children don’t like doing: going to protests with you. Should you have children, drag them to as few protests as possible.
JL: I think the plan is to bring them!
The third option is something that I call in the book neo-Reform, the adaptation and reinterpretation of Torah and the tradition in non-normative ways. This can take forms of saying that actually the distinction between Jew and Gentile in terms of religious observance is not relevant. Or, if there are problematic lines in Torah [about gender, sexual orientation, etc.], just skip those lines.
And the fourth option in the book is something I call separatist Orthodoxy, by which I don’t only mean haredi or ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but I mean that primarily. The reason why I think that’s an option is because haredi society in America has really built an incredible parallel world to liberal, institutional American Jewish life. It’s not a hundred percent insulated, but it’s a way of life that is based on a very different value set than mainline, affiliated Jewish life. There’s a huge amount I think we can learn from a life that’s centered around obligation, to the extent that haredi life has a massive mutual aid network and communal support. And gemachs, as you know—I don’t need to tell you about these sorts of things.
MO: A gemach is—it’s a thrift store, but stuff is often free. It’s a freecycle store, where you can get wedding gowns, mezuzahs, cookware.
Let me leap forward to something that I think is actually running through the book. I think a lot of what you’re talking about here is culture and counterculture, right? Which is that Jews came here, and a lot of them initially found their Americanness through certain countercultures: labor activism, socialism, radicalism, whatever. Then, ultimately, Jews entered the mainstream culture. They became Americanized in lots of ways, right? Like, that was the assimilationist grandeur of America.
And a lot of what you’re talking about when you talk about the four paths forward is this: are there possibilities for Judaism to be something other than just mainstream culture? I got that what you found appealing about both your time spent in haredi communities and your time spent writing for Jewish Currents, and on the left, is they both feel like countercultures, committed to something other than bland American mediocrity. Is that remotely fair?
JL: I would say that’s very fair. I mean, more than bland American mediocrity, it’s America’s materialism. There should be a challenge to materialism, to the kind of atomizing effects of social media and our gross, pleasure-seeking world of infinite choice. I mean, I thought the leftist world was an alternative to that. It turns out that if you live in a haredi community, your life is way different than the American mainstream. If you’re a leftist, you might have a lot of really deeply held convictions, but you basically live the same life as everybody else.
MO: You’re streaming the same shows on Netflix.
JL: Yeah. I happen to be an anti-TV fundamentalist. I don’t watch TV and don’t have a TV.
MO: I thought we were going to be friends, but …
Let me tell you, having some children, what children don’t like doing: going to protests with you. Should you have children, drag them to as few protests as possible.
JL: My maybe old-school kind of cultural critique here is that I think that there are forces in American life that are numbing us to the important questions. And I want a Jewish culture and a Jewish life that rejects those numbing tendencies. And I don’t think I’ve found the answer, I’m still kind of stewing around in this …
MO: Is the problem of being a unique human looking for authenticity that actually all clubs suck?
JL: Yeah, in their ways. They’re all imperfect.
MO: There have been controversies around the book. There was a reading that was canceled in Brooklyn. What nerve have you and your book touched in primarily the American left, but probably also the American right?
JL: It’s a good question. I mean, I’m still trying to figure it out for myself. Even before the book came out, I had broken with close colleagues in large part over their response to [the Hamas attacks of last] October 7th. Whether for fear of contributing to backlash or out of genuine belief, there was just the thought [on the left] that either the killing of Israeli civilians was acceptable, or not worth condemning in public. And I think what’s continued to happen over the last year is that there isn’t space in a lot of progressive life, at this point, to even say words like “Jewish vulnerability,” to recognize that you can acknowledge that American Jews are going through a very difficult time without diminishing the magnitude of Palestinian suffering, without justifying Israel’s actions.
That kind of space to maneuver has really narrowed. And so I think that’s how the book ended up really angering a lot of people on the activist left who don’t see any place for that kind of politics. But I think it’s a moral necessity.
I also think it’s a strategic necessity. If we’re serious about wanting to change American policy on Israel, it’s going to take moving the American Jewish community.
Mikhael Manekin is a good friend and interlocutor. And in his book, which has just been translated into English, he has a very good line about how, if you’re religious, if you’re an observant Jew, you need a shul. And sometimes that means going to shul with people who you really disagree with. And I think if there’s a change that happened for me over the course of writing the book, it went from being like, “I can’t walk into a shul where I know that the people have views that I might find repugnant” to thinking, “Well, what does that do? I guess I’ll feel good about it, but it doesn’t really do anything. And I lose out on a lot.”
And Mikhael had the suggestion, “What would it mean if we stayed? If all the kind of people who felt politically alienated just stayed in the religious spaces, full of people who they really argue with?” And I have intentionally done this over the last nine months. It’s been really interesting. And at times, infuriating. I understand the impulse to want to build new shuls and build new communities.
MO: I actually triple-underlined that passage in the book where you talk about how you used to not want to pray with people who you thought might support Israel’s occupation, but then you realized some of them might actually be kind; they might be wise in other ways.
JL: Right. I might want to really shake them when they talk about Israel, but I also might learn something from them too, and they might also learn something from me.
And one of the most shocking—or perhaps ironic—parts of the book’s rollout has been that, in part because I had already been rejected by the right, there wasn’t so much of a backlash from the right. But the left backlash then brought the book back into normative and even right-wing and Orthodox spaces! My wife and I just did a podcast with 18forty, an Orthodox podcast. And the responses that we’ve gotten have been overwhelmingly more positive than the ones that I got from people who ideologically are here and I’m, like, one step not as left-wing [he holds his fingers an inch apart]. Someone sent me a LinkedIn message saying, “I’ve never met someone with politics as left-wing as you. Can you call me and talk to me, because I want to understand how you got to where you are?” And I think that maybe there’s a hunger in more observant spaces for critical thinking on these issues.
MO: So are you going to call him?
JL: Yeah, I’m gonna call him.