Acting Jewishly During a Genocide

On Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered

Charlotte E. Rosen

August 27, 2024

Tablets Shattered

by Joshua Leifer

Penguin Random House

2024

American Judaism’s Ethical Abyss

Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered begins, as he writes, “on the wrong side of an Israeli soldier’s gun.” He was working as a journalist in the Palestinian West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, an “epicenter of an unarmed popular resistance movement.” A small village outside Ramallah, Nabi Saleh might have not reached international media attention had it not been for the organizing efforts of Bassem and Nariman Tamimi. Beginning in 2009, the pair began holding weekly protests against religious Jewish settlers who, with the assistance of the IDF, had illegally taken over their sole water source in 2009.¹ These settlers, residents of the nearby illegal West Bank Halamish settlement, continued to encroach upon the residents of Nabi Saleh’s’ land and had burned hundreds of the village’s olive trees.² For daring to protest the settlers’ theft and intimidation, Israel has marked the Tamimi family’s home—which they had raided hundreds of times—for demolition. And though the Nabi Saleh demonstrations are always peaceful, the IDF frequently responds to them with force; in 2011 the IDF killed Mustafa Tamimi (Bassem’s cousin) by hitting him with a tear gas canister at close range. According to Bassem, 250 protesters have been arrested, 100 of them children.

The demonstration Leifer recounts in the opening paragraphs of Tablets Shattered had been sparked by the Israeli army’s arrest of Ahed Tamimi, Bassem and Nariman’s teenaged daughter, who had been detained for slapping an IDF soldier attempting to breach their home.³ Nariman had also been arrested for filming the event, which, as Leifer writes, “transformed Ahed almost overnight into a tragic symbol: of courageous defiance in the face of power, and of the crushed dreams of successive Palestinian generations that have come of age under military rule.” Leifer recounts “the sound of the tear gas canister” as it “left the barrel of the gun,” the “coughing, retching, moaning” and “the fearful shouts of people running away.” “Nearly every journalist I know who has been to Nabi Saleh,” he concludes his opening paragraphs, “left the village in some way changed by what they saw.”

What seems like a forthcoming reckoning with Israel’s depraved, death-dealing system of Palestinian dispossession and military occupation gives way to a far more vexing, and bafflingly regressive, set of claims. It is striking that a text that opens with the author’s up-close view of the IDF’s violent repression of Nabi Saleh residents closes with an afterword on October 7, where Leifer devotes paragraphs to chiding the Left (as he has also done in the pages of Dissent) for failing to properly “mourn the deaths of Israeli Jews” killed by the Hamas attack.⁴ He even implies that American Jewish leftist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow had been insensitive in calling on American Jews experiencing grief or fear after October 7 to resist translating their emotions into justification for a retaliatory, genocidal war against Palestinians. In his final paragraphs, he affirms his decision not to sever the connection between his Jewish identity and the “Jewish state,” apparently uninterested in grappling with such a term’s inherent illiberalism, not to mention the material reality of Israel’s racist, ethno-supremacist regime. Moreover, despite clear evidence of Israel’s unending brutality against Palestinians, of which the current genocide in Gaza is merely the most recent and extreme entry, Leifer insists the Jewish left must recognize that “thinking and acting Jewishly…requires recognizing that Israel, more than any other place, is where Jews live.”

The political distance between Leifer’s beginning and end mirrors the book’s bewildering construction and politics. Part history, part memoir, part political manifesto, Tablets Shattered is effectively a couple of books in one. One can almost feel a tangled and contrarian ideological evolution in the text, where he develops from a mainline religious Zionist raised in 1990s and early 2000s suburban New Jersey, to a budding antiwar activist critical of Zionism’s “bellicose nationalism,” to a journalist who married into a Haredi (and implicitly Zionist) family who now contends that ultra-Orthodox Judaism “constitutes…the strongest and most viable alternative to the now fading American Jewish consensus.” There are more than a few glaring contradictions left unresolved; Leifer’s jarring re-embrace of Zionism, with all of the right-wing and settler colonial implications the ideology carries, is just one among many.

Tablets Shattered is not billed as a polemic. While he promises to make “no secret” of his “political and religious commitments,” he frames the book as a serious accounting of “the fracturing of American Jewish life in the twenty-first century” and the “attempts to reconstitute Jewish life amid the ruins. Indeed, he begins his book conventionally, offering a synthetic history of the modern American Jewish experience that is well-trodden scholarly terrain. He contends that there were three core “pillars” of “mainstream American Jewish identity” that had “solidified” by the end of World War II. The first pillar, which also serves as a kind of core foundation for the other two, is Americanism, or American Jews’ “belief in the inherent and exceptional goodness of America.” The second is Zionism, which Leifer argues “rescued” American Judaism at a time when Jews’ ascent into middle- and upper-class suburban whiteness and increasing detachment from traditional religious Jewish practice threatened the salience of Jewish American identity. The third pillar is liberalism, where, as Leifer writes, Jews began to abscond from “traditionalist Orthodoxy…inherited from earlier generations” and instead consider their Jewish faith and practice a matter of private choice, amenable and moldable to their “suburban, middle class lives” rather than “sacred obligation.” Along the way, Leifer takes us through pivotal American Jewish historical events, such as the display of mass working-class Jewish protest politics after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the creation and eventual deradicalization of the Workmen’s Circle, mid-century sociological and religious anxiety over the decline of a suburbanized American Jewry, the surge of American Jewish Zionist sentiment after the Six Day War, the rise of the neocons, the late twentieth-century Jewish religious revival, and countless others.

These three pillars, Leifer argues, held relatively firm throughout the twentieth century. In the 1990s, however, this “communal consensus” began to “crack.” Told through an accounting of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and the perilous signing of the Oslo Accords, Leifer explains the “bifurcation” beginning to take hold of American Jewish life. American Jewish communal organizations, run by the most devoted adherents of the 1970s-era “inward turn” to Jewish religious practice, began to diverge from the politics and preferences of the American Jewish majority, who were generally supportive of Rabin’s “peace plan” and provisionally open to criticism of Israel.

As many Palestinian observers pointed out at the time, Rabin’s plan was far from a truly “peaceful” solution: it ultimately maintained Jewish territorial supremacy, denied Palestinian statehood, and upheld Israeli colonial control—to say nothing of Rabin’s then-recent history of history of ordering Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinians during the first Intifada.⁵ Nevertheless, mainstream American Jewish institutions hitched their agendas to a more fervently Jewish supremacist, exterminationist vision that rejected even Rabin’s limited “peace” plan and smeared him as an “enemy of the Jewish people.” Believing in the “the abstract, divine right of the Jewish people to the entire Land of Israel,” mainstream American Jewish religious, cultural, and political organizations aligned themselves with rabidly right-wing Israeli figures (such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and Itamar Ben-Gvir), maligned critics of Israel as anti-Semitic, and promoted Islamophobic portrayals of Palestinians as “terrorists.” Domestically, this unrelenting right-wing vision for Israel placed even mainstream, ostensibly liberal American Jewish institutions in alliance with groups that appeared to undermine their own missions and that ran counter to the politics of most American Jews, who skew left of the spectrum. For example, under Abe Foxman’s leadership in the 2000s, the supposedly “anti-hate” Anti-Defamation League embraced right-wing evangelical Christians “because of their support for Israel.”

This divide between American Jewish institutional leadership and the broad American Jewish public might have come to a head sooner had it not been for the combination of the Second Intifada and 9/11. Leifer explains how, for American Jews, “America’s war on terror merged with Israel’s war against the Palestinians.” Both events triggered a new wave of “fear and paranoia” among American Jews, who were encouraged both by their leading religious and cultural institutions and by a broader mainstream media apparatus to view Palestinians as simply another group of “Islamofascists” threatening American and Israeli Jews. Here, Leifer overstates prowar fervor among everyday American Jews—polls from the time suggest that Jews were actually “less likely than the public at large” to support US military action in Iraq, and a poll from the American Jewish Committee found that 70 percent of American Jews opposed the Iraq war.⁶ Moreover, at the time, American Jewish leaders expressed far more “ambivalence” about the war than Leifer lets on.⁷ In other words, Leifer’s childhood experience of celebrating the US bombardment of Baghdad—in which he recounts learning that “this war was good, that it was right, that it was just”—is far from the representative experience for American Jews during this time.

However, Leifer is not wrong to point out that linking the Iraq War and the Second Intifada through the post-9/11 prism of Western Islamophobia provided powerful Israeli and American Jewish Zionists with an opportunity to bolster an again fragile future for American pro-Israel politics. Indeed, one of the more compelling sections of the book discusses the nauseating glee that Israeli and American Jewish Zionist organizations felt immediately after 9/11, viewing American Jews’ brush with terrorism as, to quote Netanyahu, an opening to “generate immediate sympathy” for Israel. A once-burgeoning (if still narrow and far from pro-Palestinian) political space for criticism of Israel was quickly and dramatically foreclosed, inaugurating the intensified era of compulsory Zionism that we continue to live in today.

But the American Jewish establishment’s suppression of anti-Israel critique, Leifer contends, was an unstable “victory.” As he writes, “by eliminating any space for dissent within the Jewish institutional world, the establishment all but guaranteed that new forms of Jewish politics would emerge outside its bounds.” The result, he goes on to show, was the development of an “oppositional Jewish politics: the reemergence of Jewish anti-Zionism, Jewish socialism, tendencies long repressed within the American Jewish collective conscience.” The remainder of the book explores these burgeoning strands of dissension and debate over what Judaism and Jewish identity means, examining how Israel—but also shifts in ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and Jewish religious tradition—has created new “fault lines” in contemporary American Jewish life.

What seems like a forthcoming reckoning with Israel’s depraved, death-dealing system of Palestinian dispossession and military occupation gives way to a far more vexing, and bafflingly regressive, set of claims.

Throughout these sections, Leifer weaves in his own family’s archetypal history of Eastern European flight, subsequent class ascendency, (white) Americanization, post-1967 Zionist fervor, and eventual return to ethnic pride and Conservative Jewish religious practice. Though these inclusions add texture to the American Jewish history he surveys, they do not entirely escape the realm of cliché, which, as Leifer himself recognizes, often accompanies such retellings. Somewhat more cloying are those sections with which Leifer interlaces his own memoir. It may be true that, as a teenager, Leifer “envied” fellow American Jews who, disgusted by newfound knowledge of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine, denounced Zionism and abandoned the institutional spaces in which they had been reared. For example, he recounts, their ability to simply put “away their Zionist sleepaway camp T-shirts” and bury their “olive-green IDF hoodies deep in a box in their parents’ basements,” and his wish to easily do the same, rather than “stewing in silent frustration.”

But hearing about his struggle to fully detach from Zionist community and institutions, despite his “disillusionment”—a hint towards his subsequent affirmation of Zionism—reads, to put it mildly, as a bit unseemly. Those Zionist summer camp shirts and IDF hoodies are not politically neutral, straightforwardly sentimental elements of American Jewish material culture; they represent the Jewish community’s shameful (and historically speaking, rather recent) allegiance to a setter colonial nation responsible for the mass displacement, dispossession, and murder of countless Palestinians. To wax poetic about his difficulty detaching from such symbols of compulsory Zionism—as if doing so represents some kind of loss for American Jews—would have been grating if it had been written before October 7. But it is particularly unnerving that Leifer dramatizes the pain of this separation as Israel enacts unending horrors in Gaza and bolsters its repressive military rule in the West Bank. It also misleadingly suggests that all American Jews feel (or should feel) spiritually and culturally connected to Israel. Such a position is not only ahistorical—as Leifer himself recognizes, diaspora Jews have never been universally Zionist—but also promotes the American Jewish establishment’s false equation of Jewishness with Israel that Leifer is, in other sections, seemingly eager to critique.

Earlier in the book, Leifer does suggest that he took bolder stands against his family and community’s Zionism, such as calling Israel an apartheid state at Passover or at one point threatening to burn his personal belongings on his parents’ front lawn in protest (“Fortunately, I never did,” he adds, again teasing his eventual return to his pro-Israel roots). But given that Leifer’s book ends with a refutation of his youthful brush with radicalism, these anecdotes become little more than brief flirtations with moral consciousness, rather than lasting political alignments, making their inclusion all the more nettling.

Chafing personal stories aside, at this point Leifer veers into internally incoherent and politically reactionary territory. The most egregious is Leifer’s contorted, but ultimately fervent, defense of Zionism. It’s a bizarrely dizzying end point for a book that spends a fair amount of time critiquing mainstream American Jewish institutions—including the ADL and AIPAC, but also the leadership of most local synagogues—for their stubborn and out-of-touch pro-Israel politics. Leifer argues that mainline Judaism’s unrelenting support for “an Israeli government uninterested in peace, an occupation that went on with no end in sight, [and] an increasingly vocal and extreme Israeli right,” along with their quick expulsion of even the most measured “dissenting voices,” has created a recipe for “obsolescence”—especially as increasing numbers of younger Jews “reject unequivocal support of Israel.” At times, he stridently suggests that the American Jewish establishment’s almost idolatrous commitment to Zionism reflects both a tactical miscalculation and, more damningly, a “moral myopia.” For example, he writes of the establishment’s total disregard for Israel’s “undemocratic one-state reality” and the thousands of Palestinians killed, maimed, and dehumanized by Israeli aggression. Drawing on his own experience in Israel, where he traveled as an eighteen-year-old to participate in a premilitary academy in Tel Aviv (despite his apparent youthful alienation from Zionism), he notes the incontrovertible reality that “Israel was an occupying power that held under its control millions of Palestinians who had no vote in the government that determined their fate. Certainly, in the occupied West Bank, it looked like apartheid.” He even refutes common Zionist talking points that erase Israeli aggression and vilify Palestinian resistance. He reflects, for example, that “while Hamas’s rockets were frightening, and while they could be deadly, Israel’s army was so much more technologically advanced, better trained, and more powerful that the Jewish establishment’s framing of the war—as a symmetrical conflict between two equal sides—appeared to me as mendacious.” In “enthusiastically cheer[ing] Israel on,” Leifer writes, the American Jewish establishment has “shield[ed] it from criticism or consequences, as it has barreled toward ethical abyss.”

Leifer appears poised, then, to recognize that Israel is not, in fact, the “only democracy in the Middle East” but rather a settler colonial, racial state dedicated to sustaining Jewish supremacy through the violent displacement, dispossession, control, and elimination of indigenous Palestinians. The reader might understandably expect Leifer—like an increasing (if still marginal) number of American and diasporic Jews, both religious and secular—to sensibly conclude that support for Israel and Zionism is morally reprehensible.⁸ As a practice drenched in blood, Zionism is utterly disqualifying as a meaningful pathway for Jewish existence and safety. However, the reader would be wrong.

Stunningly, Leifer proceeds to do precisely the opposite. He spends a good deal of the rest of the book affirming and rationalizing his commitment to Israel—though often circuitously, as if he knows deep down this position is incompatible with any serious left analysis. Unable to convincingly advance a morally cogent defense of Israel, Leifer instead retreats to a tired, intellectually unserious neoconservative mode of left-bashing. By focusing on chiding the Jewish anti-Zionist left for being insufficiently concerned with Israeli lives (a dubious claim, in point of fact) and for daring to fight for a future where Jewishness is untethered from heinous crimes of genocide and occupation, Leifer casts doubt on an uncomplicated, principled anti-Zionism that—far from some newfangled Jewish lefty assertion—is as old as Zionism itself.⁹ It’s a rather odd, path for a purported writer on the left to travel. More importantly, it’s ethically indefensible.

Dual “Responsibility” and the Affective Politics of Grief

Leifer’s core justification for refusing to renounce Zionism parades itself as a kind of sober pragmatism, as if an “adult in the room” has faced the facts of Israel’s existence and can finally discipline misguided Jewish anti-Zionists. As he writes, “by 2050, most Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state.” This means, he suggests, American Jews must contend with a future where “Jewish existence” will be “increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of the collective Jewish fate.” And, he argues, this apparently neutral fact necessitates American Jewish allegiance—albeit, qualified—with the Israeli nation-state. “The locus of the Jewish people’s historical drama is now there, in Israel, whether we like it or not,” he asserts. An apparently incontrovertible future where the “Israeli Jew, raised to live by the sword, his Jewishness taken for granted, will become the norm” is something American Jews must simply resign themselves to. He even goes as far as to state that Israel’s forthcoming eclipse of the diaspora as home to a majority of the world’s Jews means that “there can no longer be a meaningfully autonomous Jewish politics outside of [Israel].”

Despite Leifer’s breezy, matter-of-fact tone, there are a number of disturbing implications about this assertion of Israel’s “demographic reality.” That Israel has “become the homeland of the majority of the world’s Jews,” (soon-to-outpace even the US Jewish population) has not simply just “emerg[ed].” Rather, it has been catastrophically produced through the relentless slaughter, displacement, and dehumanization of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and made possible by shoehorning a once definitionally diasporic Judaism into a ghastly experiment in settler colonialism. In other words, Leifer’s demography-as-destiny analysis willfully obscures the ongoing colonial violence, racial segregation, and aggressive land theft that makes the growth of Israel’s Jewish population possible. Indeed, Leifer’s analysis is perhaps better understood as a form of demography-as-race-science: by spuriously presenting Israel’s emergence as “the global Jewish center of gravity” as a spontaneous process divorced from Israel’s history of Palestinian dispossession and occupation, Leifer helps legitimize and depoliticize an ethnonationalist project premised, as Fayez Sayegh identified in 1965, on “statehood in all of Palestine…completely emptied of its Arabs.”¹⁰

One might expect a self-proclaimed “anti-occupation Jew” to consider such matters in an argument directly related to questions of Israel’s “demographic reality.”¹¹ Yet Leifer’s discussion of Israel’s population dominance omits any consideration of Palestinians whatsoever. As a result, he shrouds his discussion of Israeli Jewish population growth in a false sense of politically neutral inexorability, while willfully enabling the ongoing suppression of Palestinian history and experience under Zionist colonialism. Indeed, Leifer’s vision of Palestinians’ role in Israel’s “demographic reality” as homeland to a majority of the world’s Jews is unclear—a glaring oversight for an author who purportedly detests Israel’s racist and eliminatory stance towards Palestinians. For example, nowhere in his discussion of Israel’s growing Jewish population does Leifer mention or endorse the Palestinian right to return—a right that Israel still denies Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba in open violation of international law. Nor does he discuss the repeal of Israel’s heinous Jewish Nation-State Law of 2018, which, as Lana Tatour argues, “simply affirms reality” in its codification of the Jewish supremacy, apartheid governance, and ongoing occupation that had long constituted Palestinians’ lived reality in a “Jewish State.”¹² No matter Leifer’s stated convictions, his consciously decontextualized and statistical appeal to Israel’s impending Jewish majority can only be read as a callous whitewashing of Zionism’s colonial origins and a tacit endorsement of Israel’s ongoing fascistic debasement of Palestinian life.

The reader might understandably expect Leifer—like an increasing (if still marginal) number of American and diasporic Jews, both religious and secular—to sensibly conclude that support for Israel and Zionism is morally reprehensible...Stunningly, Leifer proceeds to do precisely the opposite.

Additionally, Leifer’s appeal to Israel’s majority Jewish population—a “demographic reality” both less benign and less settled than Leifer suggests—does not self-evidently entail American Jewish solidarity. As Leifer appears at least nominally capable of recognizing, Jewishness is and never has been synonymous with Zionism. Leifer’s suggestion that a mere shift in Jews’ “historical drama” from a diasporic people to one predominantly organized through a Zionist settler nation-state model mandates loyal compliance from diaspora Jews towards Zionist ones is unsubstantiated—particularly when such a project is so clearly tethered to a morally objectionable politics of apartheid and occupation. Ethnic and religious similarity in conjunction with the numerical fact of Israel’s Jewish population do not entail American Jews’ alignment with fellow Jews who apply our identities and traditions in ways that generate colonial violence. In other words, while Leifer may be right that Jewish life is “increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of the collective Jewish fate,” it does not follow that this mandates diasporic Jews’ accession to Israel’s reactionary vision of collective Jewish safety. Indeed, we might do well to listen to Jewish Holocaust survivors—whose experiences are so often cynically trotted out as justification for Israel’s existence—who have instead refused translate their traumatic experiences with anti-Semitic terror into rationalizations for Israel’s terroristic regime. Instead, many have both identified with, and struggled on behalf of, the Palestinian victims of Zionism’s crimes, agreeing with Palestinian scholars who have long noted the sickening political and intellectual similarities between Zionism and European fascism.¹³ As Jewish anti-Zionist and Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer told Adri Nieuwhof in 2011,

I have so much in common with Palestinian youth. My own fate is so similar to what young Palestinian people in Palestine experience. They have no free access to education. Preventing access to education is murder in slow motion. I am serious about this; it is criminal. I was a refugee; they are refugees. I experienced all sorts of camps that limited my mobility, just like the Palestinians.¹⁴

Despite Leifer’s strange and contorted suggestions, the argument that American Jews have some customary “obligation” to defend or believe in Israel simply because it is “where Jews live” is neither self-evident, nor honorable. To imply as much requires a defensive ethnonationalism that privileges Jewish life and community over all else. Because such ethnonationalism fundamentally devalues Palestinian humanity, no serious leftist political horizon—Jewish or otherwise—could accept it. Indeed, it should go without saying that such a flagrantly racist, ethnonationalist, and anti-solidaristic posture resembles the white supremacist lynch mobs in the Jim Crow South or Boers in apartheid South Africa more than Leifer would likely wish to admit.

Leifer’s attempt to qualify American Jewish “responsibility” towards Israel by suggesting that American Jews’ involvement with Israel can yield pathways for reforming its racial colonial state is similarly unfounded. Leifer’s recognition that Israel is “increasingly impossible to justify on liberal or humanistic terms” belies a baseline recognition of reality. But while he understands those who see Israel and “want nothing to do with it,” he asserts that this is “not possible” for him, and, moreover, that “it would not be morally right even if it were.” Leifer supports this dubious claim by suggesting that sticking with Israel is not only a point of ethno-cultural responsibility, but also an opportunity for American Jews like him to “pursue justice and seek peace, instead of occupation and endless war.” “My humanism means I am appalled by Israel’s carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip and mourn the lives of Palestinians whom Israel has killed,” he writes, “my membership to the Jewish people, the plurality of whom now live in Israel, means that I am aggrieved by what my people have done.” Through our “bounds of faith, language, and heritage” and our “belonging to our collectivity,” Leifer suggests, American Jews can help “make the modern experiment in Jewish sovereignty a just one.”

This thought would be a nice idea, I guess, if it weren’t so easily undermined by the irredeemable realities of the Zionist sovereign project. Israel’s now nearly eleven-month-long genocide in Gaza—which has made images of children torn limb from limb and babies killed before their births are registered disgustingly commonplace—has placed a gruesome spotlight on Israel’s status quo of brutal occupation. But Israel’s vicious assault on the Palestinian people long predates October 7, and it certainly cannot be overlooked as an extremist warping of an otherwise liberal or social democratic Zionist state. Reams of scholarship from Palestinian and Israeli scholars alike have made Israel’s foundationally Jewish supremacist, settler colonial, and racist origins abundantly clear. Leifer’s appeal to Israel’s capacity for political redemption or tolerance is either profoundly naïve or—more likely—a form of what Saree Makdisi calls “affirmation as denial,” which cynically obstructs the “constitutive racism of Israel as a state” through affirmations of Zionism’s progressive values of inclusivity and plurality, or in Leifer’s variant, its potential to maybe someday represent such ideals.¹⁵ These liberal Zionist affirmations, Makdisi writes, are so “theatrically overstated and overperformed that it completely occludes the act of denial that it simultaneously expresses,” ultimately masking the affirmer’s actual “support for state founded on the premise of exclusion and intolerance.”¹⁶ As Makdisi quips, “not many people would knowingly endorse the desecration of a cemetery; but who would not want to support tolerance?”¹⁷ Leifer’s “political alchemy” is thus not only willfully obtuse and unbefitting of a historian-in-training.¹⁸ It also actively enables Israel’s decidedly illiberal status quo, giving cover to genocide through the active occlusion of Zionism’s true colonial history.

Perhaps sensing the tenuousness of his positive defense of Israel, Leifer’s other primary justification for American Jewish commitment to Israel focuses on smearing anti-Zionists as inhumane. His analysis raises a genuinely thorny issue: how should the Jewish left (and the left more broadly) respond to the loss of Israeli Jewish life at the hands of Palestinian resistance? As he has already done in the pages of Dissent, Leifer criticizes the American Jewish anti-Zionist left for, refusing to “to mourn the deaths of Israeli Jews as Jews” in the aftermath of October 7.¹⁹ He extends this critique in Tablets Shattered, accusing anti-Zionist Jews, “unconcerned by” Israel’s “destruction,” of advancing a politics that is, in his words, “perversely, a Jewish politics that revels in its callousness towards the lives of other Jews.” Leifer contends that anti-Zionist Jews’ “pose of radical hard-heartedness” towards Israeli Jews after October 7 , represented an “abdication of moral judgement costumed as sober realpolitik.” In suggesting that “no public expression of grief for Israeli Jews was acceptable,” he writes, “some on the left had demanded from those of us mourning what was tantamount to communal and familial renunciation: that we accept that our friends and loved ones be killed and tortured—acts imagined by erstwhile comrades as part of some cleansing, liberatory event—and that we not speak of their deaths.”

As Gabriel Winant has already articulated, someone who finds groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now offensive for daring to suggest that grieving Jews refrain from translating that grief into a retaliatory siege on Gaza is arguably someone who is uninterested in interrogating the glaring asymmetries that structure all speech related to Palestine and Israel.²⁰ But it is worth thinking through Leifer’s appeal to what Benjamin Schrier identifies as the “affective” realm, an inherently “depoliticiz[ing] retreat” that “can’t be argued with or compromised on.”²¹ In other words, as Schrier writes, “one is not asked to agree or not with affect,” rather, “affect asks only to be affirmed; to challenge affect is to reject the identity position from which it arises.” Leifer’s willful rerouting of leftist analysis of October 7 onto an affective plane can thus only be understood as an obfuscatory move that dislodges clearheaded political analysis of Israeli aggression against Palestinians no matter Leifer’s simultaneous acknowledgement of Israel’s “devastating” war on Gaza and the American Jewish establishment’s intensified “dehumanization of Palestinians” in the wake of Hamas’ attack. Leifer’s desire to cling to an “emotional both-sides-ism” with regard to Palestine and Israel has an inherently flattening effect, “cast[ing] the conflict as operating in some kind of phantasmatic natural realm beyond politics and history” and “normaliz[ing] the framing of aggrieved ‘sides’” when there is, in fact, a far more powerful historical aggressor.

This “necropolitics of affect” as Schrier writes, propels Israel’s colonial project forward by legitimizing a “non-political affect about a situation that is so absolutely political.” Such a dynamic inherently allows for any affective assertion of Israeli or Jewish life to subsume and limit meaningful acknowledgement or response to Palestinian oppression—something that Zionism has always required to thrive. “When we allow affective responses to set the terms for responding to history,” Schrier powerfully writes, “we risk engaging in a deceptive nihilism.” Leifer might do well to grapple with Schrier’s contention that Jews “rely less on the sanction offered by the self-satisfied intention behind such affective practices and instead take more seriously their deleterious consequences.”

Unfortunately, it does not seem like Leifer is willing to interrogate his politically spineless and, at times, narcissistic retreat to the affective anytime soon. Full of righteous outrage, Leifer recently shared that an event for Tablets Shattered was canceled at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Books because he had invited Zionist Rabbi Andy Bachman as an interlocutor. “I wrote this book to explore debates within American Jewish life, which of course includes many people who identify as Zionists,” he wrote, “my biggest worry was about synagogues not wanting to host me. I didn’t think it would be bookstores in Brooklyn that would be closing their doors.” His tweet garnered so much attention and shared indignation from high-profile Zionists, that the incident received coverage in the New York Times.²² Leifer, in a move eerily similar to the manufactured theatrics of arch-Zionist and Islamophobe Shai Davidai, went to Powerhouse “anyway, thinking he might be able to resolve things if he spoke in person to whomever was in charge.”²³ As the article goes on to observe, a “recording his wife made of the dialogue that followed indicated he had been mistaken.”²⁴ Throughout, Leifer and Rabbi Bachman appear as reasonable, wrongly aggrieved parties, unduly canceled for their beliefs. “The only acceptable Jew in this movement is the Jew who does not believe that Israel should exist,” Rabbi Bachman explains.

As with Leifer’s hypercritical focus on anti-Zionist grief after October 7, his decision to publicize and manufacture crisis surrounding his canceled book event has the effect of distracting from Zionism’s depravity. By keeping things in an affective register, the scandal of Leifer’s canceled talk becomes extracted from its context, inflated into the most important part of a story, and neatly packaged for use by an American Jewish establishment that feverishly yearns for more incidents with which to delegitimize Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish politics. What gets lost is the principled refusal to platform an individual who, as an avowed Zionist, fundamentally supports a racist and colonial project rooted in Palestinian dispossession and dehumanization.²⁵

Such a flagrantly racist, ethnonationalist, and anti-solidaristic posture resembles the white supremacist lynch mobs in the Jim Crow South or Boers in apartheid South Africa more than Leifer would likely wish to admit.

Indeed, muddled in Leifer’s grievance cycle is a legitimate question: why would anyone (particularly someone who is purportedly on the Left) want to be in meaningful conversation with a Zionist as Israel’s genocide in Gaza grows more gruesome and nightmarish by the second? Over 40,000 Gazans, 16,500 of whom are children, are confirmed dead (The Lancet has recently estimated nearly five times that number) from this Israel’s ten-month siege on Gaza.²⁶ Moreover, as Leifer was feeding his tale of woe to the New York Times, Gazan journalist Hossam Shabat documented three different massacres, and Israel bombed another school housing refugees, killing 50 and making that the sixth it’s bombed this month.²⁷ A seemingly endless stream of Israeli massacres and relentless bombing of purported “safe zones” produce daily images of mangled and murdered children, journalists, mothers, fathers, and loved ones, in what some have called the “first livestreamed genocide.”²⁸

American-supplied Israeli weapons have ended entire bloodlines of Palestinian families in a single evening. Hospitals, universities, schools, bakeries, and homes have been made into rubble and aid has been so severely restricted that famine is rampant and medical personnel have to perform life-threatening surgeries without proper anesthesia or sanitation. Meanwhile, Gazan prisoners captured by Israeli authorities are being tortured and raped at the Sde Teimen Israeli military detention camp; when Israeli authorities suggested investigating the Israeli soldiers responsible for the abuse, right-wing Israelis rallied in defense of their right to terrorize Palestinians.²⁹

These are just a few points of reference atop a mountain of horrors that Israel reigns down upon not only Gazans, but also Palestinians living in the West Bank under military occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel degraded by second class citizenship and racist surveillance. Amid Israel’s litany of war crimes and increasingly fascistic civil society, Leifer’s decision to construct a false, self-serving narrative of injustice that flatters Zionism—presenting it as a legitimate political vision for the left despite daily evidence to the contrary—is a clear political choice.³⁰ Whether Leifer wishes to face this fact or not, it’s a tactical move that any self-respecting leftist, Jewish or otherwise, would view as both ideologically disqualifying and, given Leifer’s ridiculous posture of innocence, more than a little cringe.

Neoconservatism Rehashed, For Some Reason

Making matters worse, Leifer devotes an alarming number of pages to the suggestion that anti-Zionist Jews (but also progressive Jews more broadly) are illegitimate or insufficiently Jewish. Here again, it’s worth noting that, while the book begins as if it might focus predominantly on the failures of the right-wing Zionist American Jewish establishment, Leifer devotes more energy to delegitimizing anti-Zionist, leftist, and progressive Jews. In other words, while Leifer is certainly critical of the mainline American Jewish establishment’s “unadulterated liberalism,” the book is far more interested in taking down anti-Zionist and progressive strands of Jewish left-liberal politics—a posture that, for a book purportedly directed towards a left-liberal audience, is troubling.

It’s also impossible to extract Leifer’s position from his recent embrace of Haredi Judaism, which has clearly led him to negatively judge his former peers on the Jewish left as unacceptably secular or—to seize an unused term bubbling just below the surface of Leifer’s account—too “woke” in their approach to Jewish faith. He often “wonders” if left and progressive Jews are illegitimately “sprinkling a Jewish fragrance onto things”—a line that feels more in step with ultra-Zionist conservative rags like Tablet or Commentary than a magazine like Dissent (where Leifer sits on the editorial board). It’s almost too obvious to state that Leifer’s thinly veiled disdain is in remarkably bad faith. More concerningly, in some sections it veers into the realm of outright antigay bigotry. By the time the book gets to his muddled and internally self-contradictory boosterism for ultra-Orthodox Judaism, one almost has to laugh in order to refrain from crying.

Leifer begins by arguing that the American Jewish establishment has replaced genuine religious belief and practice with a “live-and-let-live relativism” aligned with “America’s individualistic and liberal capitalist culture” that has led to the dissolution of American Jewish institutions. “The cultivation and pursuit of endless options,” he argues, “have made the long-term work of creating and sustaining community nearly impossible.” More damningly, he writes that the “logic of the market reduced all aspects of life to fungible value, and religious practice became, like Pilates or yoga, just another consumer good.” “American Jews had become such good liberals that they could no longer give themselves compelling reasons for why they should live Jewish lives in terms other than those American liberalism furnished for them,” he laments. Mainline Judaism’s stubborn pro-Israel Zionism and consequent “obsolescence”—especially as increasing numbers of younger Jews “reject unequivocal support of Israel”—also contributes to these failures.

Both of these arguments contain worthwhile lines of analysis, especially the latter’s interrogation of the American Jewish establishment’s unrelenting and alienating support for Israeli apartheid. But that is not, ultimately, the book Leifer writes. Suddenly and without real explanation, the Jewish left and more progressive experiments with Jewish religious practice become the primary examples of the harmful “liberal individualism” Leifer initially identifies as plaguing mainstream American Jewish institutions. Indeed, he is far more critical and dismissive both of left, often anti-Zionist, American Jewish organizations (what he calls “the Judaism of prophetic protest”), and of “neo-Reform” religious leaders or observers who aim to “take the world of politics and bring it into the synagogue.” These two movements, while sometimes overlapping, are quite distinct. Though trying to do so obliquely, Leifer essentially portrays both groups as fraudulent—or, at least, very bad—Jews. In his estimation, both groups are essentially acting as “liberals” who “choose” which elements of traditional ritual and liturgy they wish to engage with or, in the case of the former category of Jews of prophetic protest, sometimes have “no coherent approach or explicit commitment to religious observance” at all. As he writes, “Jewishness today has become a creed to be professed rather than a practice. Self-identification is, for many, its alpha and omega. Self-gratification and individual preference have supplanted commandedness and commitment to community.”

Leifer’s argument is at best ungenerous and at worst downright hostile and intolerant. Leifer accuses the Jews of prophetic protest, in which he includes groups like IfNotNow, JVP, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), of wearing their Jewishness as a mere costume. Leifer’s accusation is essentially the reactionary view notably promoted by militant Zionists with whom, at other points in the book, he claims to disagree.³¹ Leifer comes to his position as a former participant, having once been active in IfNotNow. He was even arrested at a 2014 action outside the Conference of Presidents protesting their support for Israel’s war on Gaza. But, he writes, he began to wonder whether it was “inconsistent, if not even a little hypocritical, to brandish our Jewishness in public in service of our politics while neglecting Judaism’s most basic tenets in our private lives?” In other words, Leifer suggests that leftist Jews’ insufficiently traditional performance of piousness or vocal secularism somehow delegitimizes their Jewish identity and cheapens their visibility as Jews in liberation movements. Sounding more and more like a member of the Podhoretz family, Leifer smears these Jews of prophetic protest as engaging with “ritual and liturgy” only “in service of an urgent political action,” adding that it “has no coherent approach or explicit commitment to religious observance for when the demonstration is over, and the marchers have returned to their atomized lives in cramped city apartments.” For good measure, he also makes an entirely baseless claim that these groups’ “natural tendency is on social media” rather than real concrete political action, essentially accusing them of being little more than self-righteous keyboard warriors. The steady stream of demonstrations, protests, letters, confrontations, lobbying efforts, and more from these groups is evidence of both Leifer’s poor empirical skills and his fundamentally reactionary politics.

The examples of these are so extensive, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, there are a number of religious leaders and individuals involved in Jewish left organizations, including anti-Zionist ones.³² To call their engagement with Jewish liturgy and ritual in the context of radical social movements performative is weak, uncomradely, and offensive. But his scorn for nontraditional modes of Jewish religious practice becomes even clearer—and verges on outright homophobic—in a following section on neo-Reformist Jews engaged in nondenominational, often explicitly queer- and trans-friendly forms of worship and liturgy. In a chapter entitled “Transformations of Liberal Judaism,” Leifer surveys the neo-Reformist landscape, discussing the Chicago-based Svara, a “radically traditional yeshiva” that teaches Talmud through “the lens of queer experience” and hosts a “Queer Talmud Camp.” Svara is explicitly “anti-institutionalist,” believing that mainstream Jewish institutions “can never truly become a place where queer people can thrive” (with good reason; Leifer himself details in previous sections the slow, arguably reluctantly offered gains in LGBTQ+ inclusion in mainline Judaism). The “Jewish tradition” is “no longer morally plausible” for many Jews, Svara founder Rabbi Benay Lappe tells Leifer, particularly due to its “restrictions” on “gender identity and sexuality.” Thus, Svara’s goal is to “give Judaism the radical update it needs to remain alive and relevant in a new reality.” They do this in part by creating a “euphoric alternative approach to Torah for queer people,” which insists that “Jewish tradition is already queer” and can provide, to quote their rosh yeshiva Laynie Solomon, “profound opportunities for revelation” for trans people.

Leifer claims he is “sympathetic” to “Svara’s project.” But he spends the next few paragraphs engaging in what can only be read as casting doubt on their legitimacy as Jews. Hypocritically, he critiques Svara for their “rejection of existing institutions,” despite the fact that himself has just critiqued these same organizations for their compulsory Zionism, consumerism, and disconnect with a majority of American Jews. As he writes, “how can Judaism, which requires community, survive if religious practice becomes decoupled from the life of the group, and if the role of the rabbi becomes reduced to that of a mere ritual worker, putting on occasional ceremonies with a religious aesthetic for interested consumers instead of being the anchor of religious life?” How to read this as anything other than an accusation of Svara, and the queer and trans Jews who worship with them, of Jewish fakery?

Leifer’s accusation is essentially the reactionary view notably promoted by militant Zionists with whom, at other points in the book, he claims to disagree.

As if to inoculate himself against such accusations, he claims his issue is with a “liberal-individualist mentality—not queer inclusion or gender egalitarianism.” Paraphrasing Svara’s associate rosh yeshiva Laynie Soloman’s analysis of a “euphoric’ text” from the Talmud, Leifer describes Svara’s work as an effort to find “textual grounding for crowning the individual as the chief sovereign of their own experience as opposed to precedent, custom, or top-down authority.” But what else is “the individual” referring to here other than the queer and trans identity that Leifer accuses Svara and groups like it of inappropriately recognizing and integrating into their liturgy and worship practice? He later gets closer to outright endorsing an exclusionary vision of non-Orthodox American Judaism, wondering if “at the very moment it has actualized its liberal values—inclusion, voluntarism, pluralism—it also risks abandoning the most ancient, constitutive, normative framework without which it is unclear Jewish religious life can persist.” Neo-Reformists “recoil,” he accuses, from “the tradition’s difficult obligations; the priority of familial and ethnic ties,” and in so doing, they cheapen something fundamental about Judaism, though Leifer seems reticent to assert clearly what that is. Pondering the need for the return of a “strong, binding, normative framework” for American Judaism, Leifer appears to suggest, if in a roundabout way, that queer and trans Jews should actually embrace rigidly conservative forms of Jewish ritual and religious authority that traditionally deny their humanity. Beyond the fact that there are centuries-long debates about what should or should not constitute Jewish tradition, making Leifer’s insistence upon a “normative” one rather out of place, to reduce queer and trans Jews’ identities to “merely one more consumer experience for which one might pay” is a remarkably regressive analysis to entertain.

Just as troubling is Leifer’s thinly veiled contempt for secular Jews, especially explicit leftists. As he writes in reference to the Jews of prophetic protest, “sometimes, those engaged in protest even resent the idea that they ought to have a more substantive vision of the relationship between the religious and the political.” Given the historical centrality of secular Jewish leftists in Jewish history, to be outraged that some of today’s leftist Jews don’t really care about synagogue, prayer, or religious belief verges on comical. This is far from the first moment in Jewish history where Jews have rejected religious ritual and observance and embraced a secular universalism. As countless scholars have shown, political and economic upheavals in the turn of the century Pale of the Settlement led a number of Jewish youth to break with strict religious observance, or the “hollow formalism, absurd rote learning, [and] the rituals and obligations” of their parents’ traditional Judaism.³³ Through participation in various early twentieth-century Bundist, communist, socialist, and workers’ movements, they rejected religion and took up various political projects that advocated secular radical universalism and solidarity with the oppressed, even as they still maintained clear identification with and attachments to their Jewish ancestry and identity through their use of the Yiddish language.

Leifer knows this, and he includes a substantive history of secular American Jewish leftist organizing. But he tries to create exceptions for the Yiddish-speaking secular Jewish radicals of yore that he inexplicably refuses to grant to the Jewish secular radicals of today. He writes, for example, that earlier generations of Jewish radicals were legible as Jews because they “did not abandon their Jewishness—their Yiddishkeit.” But this is an incoherent claim. Is what made this earlier generation of Jewish radicals “legitimate” Jews—individuals who Leifer acknowledges “exchanged religion for ideologies like socialism, communism, or anarchism” and were frequently anti-Zionist—their temporal closeness to the ways of the old country and their ability to speak Yiddish through the accident of their birth? Why were these Jews, many of whom explicitly rejected traditional Jewish religious ritual and communal life, exempt from the accusations of liberal individualism and fraudulence that he so readily applies to today’s secular Jewish leftists?

We never get a convincing explanation. It is, somehow, only today’s generation who are allegedly corrupting an essential Jewish identity and treating Jewishness like a “personal choice” rather than a matter of “ancestry, history, or memory.” Once prodded, Leifer’s claims about the contemporary Jewish left collapse into their own contradictions, revealing instead Leifer’s true agenda of left bashing. This is both for the sake of delegitimizing anti-Zionist voices and, as it quickly becomes clear, of justifying his own religious shift into Orthodoxy.

Indeed, his knotted analysis of contemporary American Jewish politics cannot be divorced from his recent embrace of Haredi Judaism and marriage into a Haredi Jewish family. His newfound enchantment with Orthodox Judaism, which he bizarrely endorses as the best option for American Jews today, leads Leifer to pen some of the book’s most incongruous claims. Haredi Judaism offers a way forward, he writes, because, it values community (he describes their practices as “soft collectivism” and a “practice of communal solidarity”), rejects secularism, adheres to traditional religious laws and practices, valorizes serious Jewish learning, and encourages discipline and obligation in service of family and community. This section of the book is full of anecdotes about what can only be described as Leifer’s own spiritual awakening—his awe—at his partner’s community’s practices. He writes, for example watching “children roam unsupervised” and of feeling “jealous of [his wife’s family’s] faith.”

Yet, Leifer fails to address, or only briefly admits without real critical engagement, the multiplicity of contradictions that a “left” or even liberal endorsement of Haredi Judaism suggests. The fanaticism about Zionism that Leifer finds distasteful in the American Jewish establishment is somehow acceptable, or less problematic, in the Haredi community. Though there are some detractors among leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community who believe engagement with politics goes against their community’s stated distance from the secular world, Leifer recognizes that Haredi Jews tend to vote Republican and are increasingly vocal Trump supporters, in large part because of their unflinching support for Israel and zealous support for reactionary and settler-colonial Haredi settler movements. As he writes, Orthodox Jews are “more intimately connected to Israel than any other [sect], through family ties, [and] years in yeshiva.” But because the Haredi community’s Zionism derives from an adherence to Jewish religious scriptural law “and not, as in most non-Orthodox communities, as a replacement to it” Leifer gives the impression that their Zionism is more legitimate and thus undeserving of critique.

Similarly, Leifer duly acknowledges the “real costs” of “ultra-Orthodox communal life,” such as “the clear and circumscribed role for women,” the pressure to “conform,” institutionalized homophobia, rampant abuse, and the constriction of Orthodox children’s education. Yet he appears largely unfazed by ultra-Orthodoxy’s conservatism, and at times sounds almost apologetic about it (“contrary to the popular framing, the absence of secular studies in Hasidic yeshivas is not a product of neglect”).

Whereas Leifer is eager to sermonize about the shortcomings of Jewish progressive and Leftist reimagining of Jewish tradition, his discussion of the parochial realities of ultra-Orthodoxy reads remarkably less critical, ultimately concluding that Haredi Judaism’s “intentionality, centrality of transcendent values, [and] its commitment to community and family” has much to “admire.” To be sure, he does end the chapter by musing about whether the “social conservatism and thickness of community required one another, whether the closedness and the emphasis on obligation needed to go together,” ultimately stating that he “wants the answer to be yes” but is “not sure.” Yet he follows this performative flicker of doubt with the contention that “Orthodoxy remains the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer.” This is despite the fact that, by his own brief admission, many Haredi Jews are far from poor (“more recently, money has begun to flow in as men have gone to work in well paying jobs,” including his wife’s own hometown, Lakewood, which he notes is “not an impoverished schtetl” but a “thriving, middle class town”). Indeed, Haredi Jews are arguably fully woven into a liberal capitalist fabric, both in terms of their assertion of their right to worship and run their communities privately apart from government intrusion, and in their clear participation in and enrichment through free market capitalism.

In the end, it seems that Leifer’s issue is not so much a retreat to the private realm, which he so gleefully and uncharitably accuses radical anti-Zionist and left Jewish activists of doing (“They are radicals, but they are also liberals—in the private realm, they believe anything goes”). Rather, Leifer’s beef is quite simply, and quite parochially, with secular irreligion and anti-Zionism, which both represent ways of asserting Jewish identity that Leifer finds personally detestable and illicit. It’s worth pausing upon what exactly Leifer finds so worrisome: an “open-minded, flexible, inviting” approach to “ritual and to people,” that has a “staunch progressivism at its core” but is “loose in its approach to Jewish law.” Okay. When has the Jewish left ever straightforwardly cared about following Jewish law, especially when its primary arbiters have channeled it towards reactionary political and cultural ends? And why would anyone on the left, Jewish or not, advocate for an insular, exclusionary, and conservative approach to “ritual and to people” that placed the sanctity of religious and ethnic purity over a more universalist and emancipatory vision?

Leifer is entitled to his opinions on the apparent righteousness of Haredi Judaism and the purported shortcomings of the secular and religious Jewish left. But he does not make a convincing case for the logic or soundness of these positions as an intellectual project nor as a part of a leftist horizon. Indeed, as a text that belittles Jewish leftists’ organizing for a more just world, endorses a fundamentally antifeminist and homophobic religious conservatism, and, ultimately, defends Israel’s role as an unshakeable part of Jewish collectivity, Tablets Shattered appears more like a J. D. Vance-ian stepping stone in Leifer’s eventual (and honestly, rather boring) turn to Jewish conservatism than a text worthy of any consideration on the left.

***

In Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he recounts how future Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, upon scanning the aftermath of the Jewish army’s massacring of Palestinians in Haifa in 1948, experienced a “feeling of horror.” She had “come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia,” Pappe writes, “and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier.” “But this apparently left no lasting mark on her,” as she continued to fervently support the burgeoning Jewish state’s overt and coordinated project of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.³⁴ Though Leifer would undoubtedly situate himself as far to the left of Meier, his rationale for continuing to support Israel, even a “democratic” one (arguably a contradiction in and of itself), echoes Meier’s cold witnessing and subsequent inaction in the midst Zionism’s colonial reality. Rather than being moved to act by his clear knowledge of Israel’s foundational and ongoing settler violence, Leifer clings to a fantasy of left-liberal Zionism that never was and, given this inarguable fact, cowardly burrows behind a demobilizing and ahistoricizing appeal to affect to support his Zionist convictions.

“I can’t be part of a political camp that would hurt the people I love,” he recently told Emily Bazelon at Slate, explaining his distance from an increasingly anti-Zionist diasporic Jewish left.³⁵ Embedded in this seemingly innocuous and even sympathetic affective appeal is the terrifying implication that Leifer is uninterested in or incapable of extending this same love, this same humanity to Palestinians, for whom the continued existence of Israel all but ensures their premature death. A more rigorous, politically grounded analysis of both Jewish and Palestinian safety would necessarily lead to radically different conclusions, perhaps one like Israeli anti-Zionist Arie Bober articulated in 1972:

Far from offering a haven to the persecuted Jews of the world, the Zionist state is leading new immigrants and old settlers alike toward a new holocaust by mobilizing them in a colonial enterprise and a counterrevolutionary army against the struggle of Arab masses for national liberation and social emancipation—a struggle that is not only just but that will eventually be victorious.³⁶

In the end, Tablets Shattered engages in offensive religio-ethnic purity tests, bizarrely attempts to (re)smuggle a Völkisch pro-Israel politics into US leftist organizing, and offers a set of conclusions that knowingly misreads Jewish history. It is a book riddled with contradictions, unsupported proclamations, and though often draped in respectable or tactically vague language— ethically disturbing stances. This not only includes Leifer’s run-of-the-mill liberal Zionism, but also his utterly befuddling assertion of the moral cogency of Haredi Judaism. It should be understood as a text that is transparently discordant rather than harmonious with any serious struggle for a more just world.

Anti-Zionism, Fascism/Antifascism, Israel/Palestine, Jewish identity, Politics, Racism

Charlotte E. Rosen

Charlotte E. Rosen is a writer, editor, and historian based in Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared in n+1, Nation, and Cleveland Review of Books. She is also an Assistant Editor at Public Books.

Acting Jewishly During a Genocide

On Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered

Charlotte E. Rosen

American Judaism’s Ethical Abyss

Dual “Responsibility” and the Affective Politics of Grief

Neoconservatism Rehashed, For Some Reason

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Capitalist Politics in Crisis

The Antisemitism of Zionism

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Acting Jewishly During a Genocide

On Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered

Charlotte E. Rosen

American Judaism’s Ethical Abyss

Dual “Responsibility” and the Affective Politics of Grief

Neoconservatism Rehashed, For Some Reason

***

SHARE

Capitalist Politics in Crisis

Under Postfascism, Fractures in the State Will Make Openings for Protest

The Antisemitism of Zionism

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