Who Is the American Jew?
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.”
Wouk was writing in 1959. The great wave of Jewish immigrants that arrived in America from 1880 on found a country where they were (mostly) safe from violent oppression, and were suddenly encouraged to identify themselves with the national culture.
In America, everyone comes from somewhere else. One of the indexes of Jewish success was how quickly Jewish specificity — the Yiddish language, ritual observance, close-knit community — disappeared.
According to Leifer, this pleasant evaporation was halted by the Six-Day War. After Israel’s military victories in 1967, American Jews suddenly discovered Zionism. Unlike their cousins abroad, Americans didn’t emigrate. Instead, Israel functioned as an anchor for Jewish identity.
Now, however, things are looking shaky. Millennial Jews like Leifer are estranged by Israel’s brutal wars and steady drift toward the right; he describes, during his teenage years, being “asked to leave a Passover Seder for calling Israel an apartheid state.”
But when we lose that anchor, what’s left?
Last year, a group of young anti-Zionist Jews held a protest near where I live; afterward, some people speculated that they were only pretending to be Jewish, since the Hebrew on their clothes appeared to be a meaningless string of characters. In fact, it was Yiddish. Young radical Jews are returning to the Yiddishkeit their grandparents abandoned; anti-Zionist protests often involve a highly conspicuous religiosity. This year saw plenty of Seders for Palestine.
But Leifer, a veteran of these groups, is unimpressed. Ultimately, he thinks that they really are pretending to be Jewish. They performatively adopt the signifiers of pre-Zionist Judaism, but their identity is still all about Israel. “Anger, after all, is a modality of attachment.”
Leifer is similarly suspicious of attempts to preserve Judaism by adapting it to the modern world. He visits a Yom Kippur service featuring a Palestinian drummer and meditation with two gay Zen monks. “What if in trying to fit Jewish tradition into contemporary categories, something essential — its untimeliness, its inconvenience, its challenge to liberal individualism — gets lost?” But is it really still Judaism, if it’s led by the clergy of an entirely different religion?
But he’s no less critical of the ultra-Orthodox, who have, based on precisely that challenge to liberal individualism, ended up endorsing a nativist, Trumpian politics that might make their own religious subculture impossible to maintain.
Leifer concludes that the only way to preserve Judaism is to return to observance, the byzantine rituals that keep Jews apart from everyone else. He skirts around, but never confronts, the idea that, as George Steiner wrote, the true Jewish homeland is in the text. (Maybe, instead of a militarized state or a pair of tzitzis, my big pile of books was the answer all along.)
But the real weakness in “Tablets Shattered” isn’t so much what Leifer says as how he says it. Essentially, this is a jeremiad: The children of Israel have abandoned the Law, and now they must return or be annihilated. “I am full of the fury of the Lord, I am weary of containing it.” It’s a powerful form, and a deeply Jewish one to boot.
Unfortunately, the book is not written as a thundering prophecy; instead, it’s an ethnic memoir. Leifer hits all the familiar notes: his ancestors arriving from Europe, the move to the suburbs, his childhood encounters with antisemitism, the sudden feeling of not belonging.
It’s rote, but it does neatly demonstrate his thesis. A memoir in which a 20-something writer reflects on his marginalized identity: Is there anything more American?
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