Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
“What did it mean to be American Jew when the country seemed on the verge of implosion?”
The title Tablets Shattered refers to Moses breaking the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments because the Israelites worshipped the Golden Calf. The Jewish community became fractured like the tablets and fought among them. However, God forgave them, and Moses climbed Mount Sinai and brought two new tablets. (The Torah, Exodus, 19:25.) According to the author, the Jewish people became fractured in America and were once again re-constituted.
Leifer, an esteemed a journalist, looks at the past and future of American Jewish identity, in the midst of the background of the United States political leaders, socialism, capitalism, left and right beliefs, the Jewish establishment, and Zionism. He shows how fractured these pillars of Judaism became and the solution to mend them. “American Jewish life is perhaps more contentious, more incoherent, and more disorganized than any point in the last seventy-five years.”
He claims that the three pillars of Americanism, Zionism, and Liberalism collapsed in the face of political strife, the war between Israel and the Palestinians over land claims, and the rise of socialism.
Part autobiography, Leifer begins with the emigration, in the late 19th century, of his own family as well as other Jews to America to escape the pogroms in eastern Europe. They believed that they were going to a country that promised prosperity and freedom of religion. They became prosperous but at a cost.
In 1892, the Workmen’s Circle was formed as an aid to new immigrants, who considered it a political home. “Solidarity, mutuality, obligation: these values, modern in their articulation but rooted deep in Jewish folkways and tradition, gave the Workmen’s Circle their shape.” They built schools, a network of organizations, and two Yiddish newspapers. In time, tensions rose between the leftists who embraced Marxist ideology and those who desired upward mobility. The reason was their assimilation into the mainstream of American society led them to forget their immigrant ancestors.
A century later, nothing remains about this vibrant organization. The descendants of this great migration “have neither seen this culture worth perpetuating nor built anything . . . that endeavored to embody . . . the betterment of all mankind . . .”
The post-war years saw the rise of American Jews to the middle and upper classes. “With remarkable rapidity, American Jewish integration and upward mobility accomplished the wholesale destruction of older forms of life, organizations, languages and cultural memory.”
The Jews started to look at Zionism as an antidote to religion. They began to see Israel as their homeland. In the place of socialism, they embraced Americanism, pro-Israelism, and liberalism. “Still, the cumulative effect of the ethnic revival on American Jewish culture was transformational. From the totalizing embrace of Israel and Zionism flowed a new enthusiasm for Hebrew poetry and prayer. . . . A new Zionized liturgy crystallized.”
Then, in 1995, Yitzchak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, was assassinated by an Israeli. Rabin had been seeking peace in a liberal Zionism within a Jewish majority in an ethno-state. In 1993, with President Bill Clinton officiating, Rabin signed the peace Accords with Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “Israel under Rabin seemed poised on the cusp of resolving its conflict with the Palestinians, headed toward becoming just another normal nation . . . The pillars of Americanism, Zionism and liberalism never looked sturdier.”
After the Six Day war in 1967, the right wing and religious Zionists were vociferous in their view that Israel not withdraw from the territories captured during the war. The Oslo Accords, signed earlier, were dead. These religious Zionists held demonstrations against the peace deal, even in New York. “The nationalist and messianic energies unleashed during the long 1970s had begun to overwhelm American Jewish life and destabilize it.” Rabin recognized that this is a rupture in the diaspora-Israel relationship. “Never before have we witnessed attempts by Americans who live here to put pressure on Congress against the policies of the government of Israel.”
Then, on September 11, 2001, at the same time when Al Quada began its terrorism in the U.S., Israel faced two intifadas (uprisings) by the Palestinians, consisting of suicide bombers and bombings at bus shelters and other Jewish institutions. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and bombed Iraq, and this was the start of more than two decades of occupation in the Middle East. “The communal vision narrowed to the small crack of a nearly closed door. All commitments were reduced to self-defense, security, and survival . . . the place that was supposed to have been a shelter from the vicissitudes of history.”
Between 2008 and 2014, Israel waged three wars in Gaza, killing civilians. Israel was seen the aggressor. Those American Jews who sided with the Palestinians were ashamed to acknowledge it. Anti-Israel groups, even a Jewish one, had succeeded “in shattering the illusion of a monolithic American Jewish opinion about Israel and Zionism . . . Instead, Israel had become the greatest source of division in American Jewish life.”
When Trump became president in 2016, Jews were now occupied with the reappearance of violent antisemitism. They were now able to dwell on their own experiences. Sums of money were poured in to counter propaganda of anti- and pro-Israel groups.
Late in the 2010s, the myth of American goodness was shattered when an antisemitic rally in Charlottesville where white nationalists and neo-Nazi supporters of President Trump chanted: “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, a white nationalist shot and killed eleven Jews while they were praying at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. “What did it mean to be American Jew when the country seemed on the verge of implosion?”
Now that American Jews are now in a place of uncertainty, their stability is replaced by a violent fractiousness and “we know the conditions that shaped as American identity no longer apply. How will American Jewry fare at a time when the ground of communal life has begun to crack.”
After President Trump’s election, the Jews saw America, the land of liberty and equality, becoming a fascist country. They considered themselves as victims “stripped of their culture by mobility by assimilation and upward mobility. And from this renewed feeling of victimhood followed a reclamation of public Jewish identity . . .” And the secular Jews replaced Zionism for Orthodoxy. However, if these ambivalent Jews had not found another foundation on which to stand, it might have collapsed.
The rest of the chapters are the diaspora’s (the Jews who live outside of Israel) relationship to Israel, the transformation of liberal Judaism Orthodoxy, and the future of American life. The author outlines his idea to four paths to the future. “While the affiliated mainstream appears to have been dethroned from the position of near hegemony . . . it remains an object lesson in institution building . . .” but “among all these varied paths, none approaches separatist Orthodoxy’s practice of communal solidarity.”
After the war in Gaza, many Jews thought that Israel should end their military efforts in the West Bank and give Palestinians their freedom. But they still recognized that Israel is where the Jews live. “As part of my reimmersion in normative Jewish practice, I began to rethink how to navigate political difference in Jewish life. Judaism and Americanism reinforce one another and can find a common path.”
After reading this book, the reader is invited to ponder these questions: “Is it possible to live a life defined by Judaism, at the same time guided by progressive values? How does one’s Jewishness remain while grappling with the gruesome reality in Israel/Palestine? What does it take to sustain community in an era of disintegration and flux, at the start of a new cycle of large-scale turbulence and war?”
Tablets Shattered would be suited to historians and others who have a background and knowledge of the history of the Jews, beginning the immigration from Europe to life in America over the centuries.