American Jewish life: not acquiesence, nor complicity, nor renunciation

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer is a comprehensive, brave, and thoughtful attempt to describe the history and evolution of his communal home -- and to raise uncomfortable questions.

I was a little hesitant to write about this book -- this is not my tribe after all. I belong to a different and frequently hostile Abrahamic lineage. But I often write ethnographically about my own kind, for example about white supremacy in American Protestantism or Christian nationalism. So I was interested in Leifer's take on his own problematic community. 

His story is full of pointed questions and not a few Jeremiads, well-aimed denunciations of aspects of American Jewish evolution. I will quote here at length from what I think is the fulcrum of his story:

... We are on the cusp of a new -- and in Jewish history, unprecedented -- demographic reality.

By many accounts, Israel has already surpassed the United States as home to the largest single population of Jews in the world. ... By the year 2050, Israel is projected to be home to the majority of the world's Jews. According to a 2015 Pew survey, by mid-century Israel's population "is expected to be significantly larger than the U.S. Jewish population." ...

In raw numerical terms, the eclipse of American Jewry by its Israeli counterpart marked the end of the American Jewish century. From 1945 until the early 2000s, the long postwar period during which the American Jewish identity as we know it took shape, the United States claimed the majority of the world's Jews. No longer...

The Holocaust destroyed European Jewry, and with it the world European Jews had made. In the aftermath, the United States emerged as the demographic center of global Jewish life, while the new state of Israel claimed to be the Jewish people's spiritual core and its national and physical future. ...

For ordinary American Jews, however, Israel mainly made being Jewish easier by allowing them to jettison the pesky rituals and obligations or religious observance for political nationalism. With assimilation imagined by American Jewish leaders as the only alternative, Zionism's replacement of religion seemed a reasonable means of sustaining Jewish identity in a secular age, and the dual-centered model thus appeared as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most Israeli leaders, however, imagined this situation as merely an interim one. As they saw it, the day Israel surpassed America as the global center of Jewish life -- when the diaspora would finally be negated -- was only a matter of time.

The emergence of Israel as the homeland of the majority of the world's Jews will mark more than a simple demographic shift -- it will constitute a revolution in the most basic conditions of Jewish existence. Diaspora defined Jewish life from 70 CE onward. Centuries of exile constituted Judaism and gave rise to the rabbinic tradition ... By 2050, for the first time in two millennia, most Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state. It is not just the American Jewish century that will have ended, but an entire era of Jewish history.

American Jews today live in the slipstream of this epochal transformation. The turbulence and incoherence of Jewish life in 2024 owes much to the interregnum in which we find ourselves, the time-space between two paradigms of Jewish existence, increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of Jewish collective fate.

It is a reality to which few have adequately managed to respond. Neither the American Jewish establishment nor the anti-Zionist left offers sufficient avenues for navigating the diasporic double bind. While the former carries on as if nothing has changed, ignorant or inured to the suffering in Israel/Palestine, some on the left hope to escape their condition by fantasizing of Israel's destruction. But neither complicity nor renunciation will work. ...

Leifer sees four main paths forward for American Jewish identity now that the community's century of primacy within the world Jewish community is over: the "Dying Establishment" (think AIPAC, the Israel Lobby), "Prophetic Protest" (think Jewish Voice for Peace), "Neo-Reform" liberal religiosity, and Separatist Orthodoxy. None fully attract him.

The book was completed just days before the October 7 2023 Hamas massacre and Israel's unconstrained devastation of Palestinian Gaza, both the people and the territory. He cannot see his way forward: 

As a Jew and a progressive, I often feel closed in on from both sides, pinched between great shame and great fear. I am infuriated by the crimes of the state that acts in my name, and more worried than I have ever been by the rising acceptability of conspiratorial thinking and demonization of Jews. It often feels like an impossible place.

But it is the place we must hold. ... To change our people, we must be with them. That is our responsibility.

That sentiment should be familiar to any American (which is what Leifer is after all, in addition to being a Jew) who has lived the last 70 years of an ascendent and declining American empire, mucking about the world to the detriment of too many. That too is an impossible place to be. But here we all are.