Tablets Shattered

The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

De: Joshua Leifer

Narrado por: Eli Schiff

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience

From esteemed journalist Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in.

Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future.

Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the arrival of his great-grandmother Bessie from a shtetl in Belarus and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then reports on the state of today’s burning Jewish issues. We meet millennial Jewish racial justice organizers, Orthodox political activists, young liberal rabbis looking to “queer” the Torah through exegesis, Haredi men learning full-time at the world’s largest yeshiva, progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism, and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews.

As it traverses today’s Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, Tablets Shattered also charts the universal quest to build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture.

Essential read for the foundation of the Jewish future

Full of integrity and vulnerability, the narrative connected dots that I never knew touched and made me feel like I belonged to a place in Jewish history.

The whole story and insights

Well written, thoughtful….Leifer is wise beyond his years, even if you don’t agree with all! ….worth a read or listen!

Pro-Palestinian

He gives a survey of Jewish American history including his own family to demonstrate the shrinkage of American Judaism and the new power center of Israeli judaisms. At first I thought he was a traitor, but as he unfolded his view I rescinded my initial impression. However I do not think he understands that Palestinians don't want a 2 state solution, they want all Israel dead. He is a feel good liberal with no common sense or understanding of the brutal ugliness of reality. When you have enemies who just want you dead, what should you do? Kill or be killed. That is the way of human history, how the Torah rolls and how evolutionary psychology reveals the mechanisms within the collective brain.

Terrific book with an unfortunate narration issue

This book is an excellent explication of the past and present of non-Orthodox American Jewish life. The narrator, who otherwise does a fine job, consistently mispronounces two key words as "JudYism" and "antisemEtic." It's "JudAism," and "antisemItic," as they are spelled. These are common and irritating mispronunciations, unexpected in a book ABOUT Judaism and antisemitism!

Fantastic, introspective — Important for Millenials and Gen Z

Just a really edifying and well-written title. I think it makes a serious attempt to treat Judaism as a spiritual heritage first: a system of values and religious practices that, for milenia, were absent earthly socio-political aims. As an American non-Jew who grew up in a very Jewish (reform, secularist) community, I found the emphasis on spiritual life and rejection of socio-political Judaism incredibly interesting and revealing. Given that Leifer and I are of the same generation, I think other people our age and younger will find this book particularly worthwhile (if they take the time to read it), and, hopefully, resonant.

A balanced review of American Jewish history

It is hopeful that Joshua Leifer returned to a traditional Jewish community while remaining a leftist in respect to Israel. The Orthodox community to which I belong in the southern tier of NYS does not tolerate criticism of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, including Israel’s conduct of the current (2023-) Gaza war. The book captured the goals of my grandparents who came to New York from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The author well presents the cultural and political reasons for the survival of ultra-Orthodox yeshivas that do not equip male students with the minimal know-how necessary to earn a living.