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Who Is the American Jew?
Joshua Leifer’s “Tablets Shattered” is both a history of Judaism in America and a cri de coeur from a heartbroken member of the tribe.
TABLETS SHATTERED: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, by Joshua Leifer
In 2022, I visited the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Jewish settlement that’s wedged like a splinter into its ancient core. According to the settlers I talked to, they’d joyfully revitalized one of the oldest and holiest Jewish cities.
It looked like a wasteland. Ruined streets, littered with broken glass and machine-gun nests, in which the settlers had erected sterile apartment buildings, growing like alien crystals.
Every few minutes, I’d be stopped by one of the thousands of soldiers who patrol the occupied zone. They’d thumb suspiciously through my foreign passport, and then ask my religion. This is not a question I’ve ever faced from an armed official anywhere else in the world. But when I said I was Jewish, suddenly they grinned. “Jewish, good! Jewish, we like!”
When we said “Jewish,” these soldiers and I, did we mean the same thing? In the West Bank, Judaism has become a martial creed: It means that these hilltops belong to me, and I am free to do violence to whoever already lives there.
I didn’t recognize anything of my own religion in it, but my version is made from flimsier stuff. Instead of mythic certainties, I’ve got a big pile of books, a good recipe for matzo ball soup, a pair of candlesticks I never use and an overbearing mother.
Surveying the state of 21st-century American Judaism, Joshua Leifer finds a similar, sad pile of cultural detritus. “What is left of American Jewish culture has lost its distinctiveness and its bite, devolved into mere kitsch and cliché: no more Saul Bellow novels, only Seth Rogen movies.” His “Tablets Shattered” argues that American Jewry is, if not quite extinct, on its way out. He quotes the novelist Herman Wouk: “There will be no death camps in the United States. The threat of Jewish oblivion is different. It is 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.”
