In his new book “Tablets Shattered,” journalist Joshua Leifer sees American Judaism in transition. For decades, Leifer writes, much of American Jewish life was characterized by a pervasive sense that America was the center of Jewish culture. It was the place that had provided safe harbor for Jewish immigrants fleeing poverty and genocide, and a steadfast supporter of Israel.
But towards the middle of the 20th century, Leifer argues, many American Jews faced a kind of identity crisis. Having worked so hard to assimilate into mainstream American life, they suddenly felt less dependent on Jewish identity to define themselves.
And then came the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, from which Israel emerged having claimed vast swaths of territory in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
As Leifer recently told The Show’s Sam Dingman, these conflicts prompted a radical reinvention of American Jewish identity that continues to this day.
Full conversation
JOSHUA LEIFER: Israel basically offered a kind of identity life raft in a lot of ways for American Jews who were searching for something more.
SAM DINGMAN: There's a quote in the book, I think it's from Herman Wouk, where he, he says the threat of Jewish oblivion has become “the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high powered station wagon with the golf clubs in the back.”
LEIFER: It's a great quote. It's very angst of suburbanization. I mean, there was also, of course the pride of seeing Jews be strong after the Holocaust, which is, I think something that often gets lost when people think about the wars in 1967 and 1973, which is that the reaction that Jews have is related to this moment in time when what we now call the Holocaust, the events of the Holocaust are, are being metabolized by a lot of Jews.
DINGMAN: Right. One of the ways that you put this in the book and this is actually very early is you, you talk about this kind of dawning new sense of Israel-centric Jewish identity as “the bellicose nationalism of people who bound together by the trauma of the Holocaust, having only understood themselves as history's ultimate victims, could not recognize that they now possessed power.”
And the thing I really love about that description is that, you know, I realize we're skipping a few years here, but this somewhat sets the stage right, for a period between 2008 and 2014 that you argue in the book is the backdrop for the moment that we're seeing right now.
LEIFER: Yeah, exactly. I mean, in 2008 Israel wages what was then one of the most destructive wars it had waged against the Palestinians, what Israel calls Operation Cast Lead. There's a very short military operation called Killer of Cloud in 2012. And then in 2014, there's Protective Edge, which is also one of the most destructive wars.
And in each of these, a generation of American Jews is exposed to AN Israel is very, very different from the Israel that their parents knew. instead of an Israel that seems vulnerable compared to its adversaries, This is an Israel that seems massively more powerful than the Palestinians.
DINGMAN: And one of the, one of the things that you highlight in this section of the book is the extreme difference just in raw casualty count in these conflicts. In Cast Lead, 1,385 Palestinians die as opposed to 13 Israelis. In Killer of Cloud, 167 Palestinians die versus two Israeli soldiers and four Israeli civilians. And then in 2014, 2,104 Palestinians killed as opposed to 66 Israeli soldiers and six civilians. And as you frame it in the book, these raw numbers seem to be a kind of real awakening for primarily younger Jewish Americans to this, this different consciousness about what Israel is and what it represents.
LEIFER: Exactly. Oct. 7 alone was the deadliest day in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And one of the things just sticking out loud with you here, that, that will remain to be seen actually is whether this will lead to a new sort of paradigm.
DINGMAN: Yeah. But as you point out in the book, beyond the concerns on a human rights level and on a political level that many people have about this conflict, there is this really important cultural backdrop, which again to quote you, you frame very memorably as “what is left of American Jewish culture appears to have lost its distinctiveness and its bite, devolved into mere kitsch and cliché no more Saul Bellow novels, only Seth Rogen movies”
LEIFER: I mean, I think, I think the erosion of alternatives, of alternative forms of Jewish identity and expression is totally essential to the, why the crisis over Israel is so deeply felt because we have this historical process by which Israel becomes the core of American Jewish identity. But then the question is what happens if Israel isn't something that people can positively identify with? What's left? Jewish secularism doesn't have the dynamism that it has when it's the Saul Bellow novel, which is Saul Bellow becoming an American.
DINGMAN: Well, and there's a particularly interesting concrete backdrop to all of that that you talk about in the book, which as you say again, quoting you, “in raw numerical terms, the eclipse of American Jewry by its Israeli counterpart marked the end of the American Jewish century.”
And, and what you're talking about is the fact that by 2050, most of the Jews in the world will live in Israel. And if I'm not mistaken, there are already more Jews in Israel than there are in America. And that's a very profound change for a number of reasons. But one of the big ones that you talk about is that it, it makes it harder to hold on to this identity that Jews had for so many generations as a diasporic people, a people characterized by having no, no true home.
LEIFER: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what I mean by the American Jewish century in, “Tablets Shattered” is that the 20th century was the period of Jewish history when American Jewry was the strongest diaspora and was arguably the center of global Jewish life. And American Jews understood their relationship to other Jews as being at the center of this relationship. And one of the things that's changed is that, that's no longer true.
And there's this other population center of Jews that's bigger and becoming bigger. And part of also what adds to the weight of thinking about how does Israel fit into American Jewish identity is that Israel setting the terms of America of Jewish identity period in the world.
DINGMAN: Well, I wonder Josh, perhaps in closing, then if I could ask you to read a passage that comes towards the end of the book that I think speaks to what you were just saying. It's on page 217.
LEIFER: Yeah. “I will not renounce my belonging to our collectivity nor will I adopt a pose of radical hardheartedness toward the fate of Israeli Jews as some on the American left have done. I do not chant ‘not in my name’ but prefer to accept that because Israel is increasingly home to most of the world's Jews, I am as a Jew implicated in its crimes. I want to speak to my fellow Jews to beseech them if necessary even to force them through sanctions or conditions imposed on future U.S. support to pursue justice and seek peace instead of occupation and endless war. Our fates are inextricably entangled. So it is my obligation.”
