The Future of Judaism in America: On Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered

The war between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the expansion of hostilities into Lebanon and the missile assault on Israel by Iran have thrust the Jewish state foremost into the headlines. It has also sown new divisions in the American social and political fabric, further exacerbating tensions and hatred in what is already a deeply divided nation. America’s military support of Israel and the accompanying loss of civilian life in Gaza, now exceeding 42,000 dead, the majority innocent women and children, has occasioned fervent demonstrations in support of the Palestinians on college campuses and in the streets. Passions have been aroused on many sides. Those supporting Israel have also been on the barricades.

Zionism, which has long evoked opprobrium, not only among Arab and Muslim populations, but among developing nations, has become a dirty word, equatable with unqualified evil. Zionism was the political movement that brought Israel into existence and created the Jewish state. Those who support Israel will interpret Zionism as the expression of the national self-determination of the Jewish people, long a fundamental precept of universal human rights. For many on the Left, in line with a post-colonial ideology that has become academically fashionable, Israel is excoriated as a “settler colonialist” entity whose very existence is construed as illegitimate.

The rise of pro-Palestinian fervor has spilled over into a resurgence of antisemitism which is unprecedented in the United States at least since the Second World War. Jews have long felt secure and have prospered in America. Current events have shaken that security and have raised the question among many Jews as to whether beneath the veneers of safety and extraordinary accomplishment, Jews in America will re-experience their historical status as the perpetual outsider. Though latent and for the most part muted for decades, antisemitism has become manifest again. Jews now feel vulnerable.

I began this essay on October 7^th, the anniversary of the unprecedented and vicious slaughter of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas terrorists, often cited as the greatest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel is experiencing collective trauma, and many American Jews share in the agony of ongoing hostilities.

These events, taking place far away, have raised many painful questions as to the place of Jews with regard to the larger society. It has also raised questions within the American Jewish community as to the place of Israel as a major component of Jewish identity. These questions are by no means new, but they have taken on much greater urgency given the volatility of current events, painful as they are.

It is also a factor, among many others, that figures into current dynamics of what it means to be a Jew in America, and raises concerns and apprehensions about the future of American Judaism. These questions, though brought into stark relief in the moment, bear a long and extremely complex history.

The future of Judaism in America is the subject of recently published Tablets Shattered by journalist Joshua Leifer. This timely book, thoroughly researched and nuanced, is written in a polished, high-minded, and sophisticated style. This is not merely an academic study of American Jewry. Woven through his narrative is a deeply personal and honest exposition of Leifer’s identity as a Jew and the evolution of the American Jewish community in the 20^th century.

Leifer identifies himself as a “mainline affiliated” Jew, an identity to which he is inextricably attached. But Leifer’s Jewish commitments are by no means without their vicissitudes. He is admirably honest and realistic about his changing viewpoints, his angst, and his ambivalences which feed into his conclusions as to where Judaism is heading in America. Tablets Shattered provides an assessment of the rising success of the Jewish community, and leads to the conclusion that it is “cracking and crumbling.” His approach is historical, sociological and political, but it is also a memoir, a personal cri de coeur. Leifer is clearly pessimistic about the American Jewish future, a conclusion for which he provides exhaustive evidence.

I was gripped by Leifer’s study. Though he is less than half my age, his struggles with Jewish identity are parallel to my own. While I was educated in an Orthodox synagogue and had an Orthodox bar-mitzvah, and mine was a Jewish home, Jewish practice was minimal. Leifer’s commitment to Judaism has run much deeper and has been continuous. Leifer spent his early education in a Jewish day school and as a youth there were multiple stays in Israel. Mine was not a Zionist home. I didn’t develop an interest in Israel, or view it as a component of my identity until after the 1967 war, as Leifer notes, many Jews did. After my bar-mitzvah, I moved away from Judaic belief and found meaning in a humanistic world view and a career in the Ethical Culture movement. Though Ethical Culture was excoriated in some Jewish circles as an escape for Jews from their Jewish identity and a fast track toward assimilation, my motives for joining Ethical Culture emerged as a fulfillment of my Jewish values and not in defiance of them. From childhood I always valued my ethics as emerging from my Judaism. My being Jewish comprises my interiority at its deepest levels. There is an adage in Yiddish, “Az ihr hot nicht kein rachmones, vos macht ihr a Yid?” “If you don’t have compassion, what makes you a Jew?” Such insight has been a source of personal meaning and pride.

It is that identification that also generates searing personal conflict in light of where Israel has moved politically and ethically, namely solidly to the right. The wanton destruction of innocent life in Gaza brings that conflict into stark relief. In an earlier essay I noted that on a trip to Israel last February, despite the national trauma caused by the unprecedented assault of October 7^th, I encountered not a single Israeli, many with whom I ostensibly shared common values, who expressed a word of compassion for the disproportionate killing of innocent lives in Gaza. It is an ethical absence expressed by too many American Jews as well, and I have found it painful in light of what I have always considered central to being Jewish in any justifiable sense.

Both Joshua Leifer and I are leftists, which generates further conflict and distress as pro-Palestinian demonstrations have too readily morphed into a yen for Israel’s very destruction, and even beyond, have been an outlet for antisemitism.

But Zionism comprises just one aspect of a much broader thesis. Leifer traces the trajectory of Judaism in America with reference to the evolution of his family through generations. The years from 1881 to 1924 saw the emigration to America of more than two million Jews from Eastern Europe. They were fleeing not only czarist pogroms, but also, in many cases, rabbinic establishments in the search of freedom and new opportunities. In the move across the Atlantic, the new arrivals, who were born into folk Orthodoxy, quickly shed their religion as they sought to assimilate to America and its values. Such was the case with Leifer’s family and my own. In my case, my maternal grandparents arrived from Eastern Poland around 1900 and lived in the Lower East Side before moving to the Bronx. Though they lived in the United States for 70 years, they never learned English. Their seven children related to their Old-World parents with muted disdain and became radically secular, one becoming a Stalinist and younger brother a radical Trotskyist. There was an annual Passover Seder, which was formally correct, but devoid of underlying belief or reverence. The only exception was my mother, who was the youngest and who retained some vestige of religious practice within the context of upwardly mobile middle-class aspirations.

As such, sustaining Jewish identity, as Leifer makes clear, involved deliberate effort in light of the blandishments of consumerism and the opportunity for social climbing that America provided. Leifer identifies three pillars around which Jewish identity has been centered that began at the turn of the century and solidified after World War II.

The first was Americanism. America provided promise and the promise was fulfilled. American freedom and opportunity provided a powerful counterweight to the Jewish history of persecution. Jews, as never before, flourished in the new land. But, as Leifer notes, success came at a very severe cost:

“…while Americanism gave much to American Jews, it also exacted a significant and ultimately devastating cost. The theorist of cultural pluralism might have hoped otherwise, but, in practice, fully joining the American project entailed the suppression and surrender of what had been the dominant forms of Eastern European Jewishness: traditionalist Orthodoxy and left-wing radicalism. These were the roots of eastern European Jewry; making it in America required that they be severed.”

In short, in the move to a new and open society, Jews had to create Judaism anew with new institutions fitted to the American environment. It is these institutions and Jewish affiliation that are shredding and now fading away.

The second pillar was Zionism, especially after Israel’s founding in 1948 and then again after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war. Israel, as a locus of Jewish identity, as Leifer notes, emerged at mid- century at a time of “embourgeoisement and suburban anomie, when a cultural and religious crisis appeared imminent.” But making Israel and Zionism central to Jewish identity was problematic in that it too was attained as a substitute for religious practice. As Leifer asserts:

“If meaning could not be found in liturgy or in synagogue, it could now be found in fundraising for the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). American Jews imagined Israel as a moral beacon and Zionism as the secular fulfillment of the religious faith in which they could no longer really believe.”

While Israel, born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, could inspire great pride in American Jews, it has not come without intrinsic problems for American Jewish identity. As implied, while support for Israel became a centerpiece of Jewish identity, nationalism is not a religion. Moreover, Zionist ideology promoted the notion that the authentic Jewish life could only be lived within the Jewish state. Hence many American Zionists found themselves fervently supporting Israel with their passion and their financial generosity while Israel collectively has construed those in the diaspora to be second class Jews.

But with Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, and the occupation and settlement of the West Bank and control of Gaza, the politics of supporting Israel dramatically and painfully changed. American military support for Israel grew tremendously and Israeli society and its government moved steadily to the right. American organizations such as AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and the Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, along with their self-appointed leaders, staunchly supported Israeli nationalism and maintained the position, with few exceptions, that Israel could do no wrong. Sustained by, and catering to super-wealthy donors, they postured themselves as speaking for a constituency they did not and do not represent, given that the overriding majority of American Jews remain liberal. Such groups actively have worked to shut down any criticism of Israel, and have actively destroyed those Jewish movements that have lodged dissent, particularly regarding Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.

Indeed liberalism is the third pillar of Leifer’s framework defining the basis of American Jewish life. It was natural for Jews to support liberal causes. Identification with the oppressed came readily, and Jews were actively supportive of the Civil Rights Movement and the feminist movement, and in the 1960s found themselves in the forefront of the New Left and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Jews supported progressive education and the labor movement. Jewish attorneys championed civil liberties and the separation of church and state, among other progressive initiatives. And Jews have reliably supported the Democratic Party, even, as often noted, when Democratic policy has run against their economic interests. The American Jewish population has been reflexively liberal.

But the embrace of liberalism, as Leifer makes clear, has led to the undoing of American Judaism and points to the central dynamic that has been its cause, often unnoticed or underappreciated. It is a conclusion he often repeats:

“But it soon turned out that what worked for liberal America could not work for Judaism. The idea of obligation-the meaning of mitzvah, the core of Jewish life-fell out of fashion in liberal capitalist culture that sacralizes individual self-expression and self-gratification. 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. In a world of limitless choice and limitless growth, the kind of commitment and restraint required to sustain community increasingly appeared as an unjustifiable and palatable anachronism. By the late twentieth century, American Jews have 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.”

A fourth pillar I would add and that Leifer discusses, but I consider weightier, is the significance of the Holocaust. The salience of the Holocaust in Jewish discourse did not emerge until several decades after the War, perhaps owing to its enormity and associative trauma. But once it did, Holocaust memory and its significance for Jewish identity became central to Jewish consciousness and worked its way into Jewish culture at large. Holocaust museums, memorial events, school curricula and the portrayal of the Holocaust in popular culture became widespread and commonplace.

Yet as Leifer maintains, these pillars have run their course and are unraveling. Americanism and liberalism have winnowed away at the religious core that has defined Judaism as Leifer understands it. Religious obligation and practice, and the communal bonds that reinforce them, have been subsumed by the dynamics comprising modern American life. Zionism, which was a benevolent cause for older generations that fostered pride and was a source of identity, for many younger progressive Jews signifies support for an ethno-nationalist militarized state, committed to the oppression and humiliation of seven million Palestinians seemingly without end. It’s been noted by some that memorializing the Holocaust sacralizes victimization and bears no relation to active religious practice. And in a few years, with the passing of the last survivors, the Holocaust will move from lived history to memory, and with this shift, its significance and centrality to Jewish identity will most likely grow weaker.

The thinning of the Jewish community is most evident in the increased pace of intermarriage. I was taught early on that marrying out was strictly forbidden and Orthodoxy requires that one’s child who weds a Gentile be disowned if not declared dead by one’s family. In the 1950s perhaps no more than eight percent of Jews outmarried. Today, if we bracket the Orthodox sector, more than 70 percent of Jews marry someone of a different faith. The shift has been a source of high anxiety in the organized Jewish community, occasioning flurries of studies seeking to pin down with precision the population of Jewish Americans. In earlier decades, Conservative Judaism had been the largest of the three major denominations, followed by Reform. Despite greater visibility, Orthodoxy compromises no more than ten percent of the organized Jewish community. Both Conservative and Reform have greatly declined, though Conservative, which I have long construed as a way station for the immigrant population, more so.

Despite large endowments, libraries, archives and synagogues, the decline is shocking. Leifer cites the following:

“Disaffiliation is a top-down as well as bottom up phenomenon. Enrollment at the existing Reform and Conservative seminaries has dropped in tandem with synagogue membership. The numbers can appear shocking. Across its Los Angeles and New York campuses, the 2022-2023 Hebrew Union College rabbinical student class had only fourteen students. At the Conservative JTS (Jewish Theological Seminary) in New York, the same year’s first-year rabbinical class had only seven.”

“At mid-century, the Reform and Conservative movements were mammoth organizations and, like the mammoths seem headed toward extinction- not tomorrow, but inevitably…The once vast suburban architecture of liberal Jewish life is becoming a mausoleum to a religious civilization that has now passed.”

What has been the cause of this decline and what, if anything, can be done to reverse it?

American society has dramatically changed in the past half century and with this change has come the advance of pluralism, women’s equality and the movement of gays into mainstream society. It was inevitable that the non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, as has been the case with mainline Protestant churches, would be compelled to adjust to these changes. The effects of postmodernism on society at-large have given rise to post-denominational- and post-God- movements within Judaism and new forms of Jewish expressions to keep pace with cultural changes. The ordination of women as rabbis was a long-standing issue of debate and contention within the Reform movement and then in Conservative Judaism. What of gay marriage? Gay and lesbian rabbis? With the explosive reality of intermarriage, Reform especially has wrestled with the issue of placing the non-Jewish spouse in the synagogue. Can he or she be a member of the temple? Hold office? Participate in religious rituals? Traditional Judaism is matrilineal. If a child’s mother is Jewish, so is the child and the father is irrelevant in this regard. Reform elected to alter this millennial doctrine so that a child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could be construed as a Jew as long as there was a stated pledge to raise the child as such.

In general, the pressures of society have resulted in liberal Judaism opting for greater inclusion, and as a result, liberalizing still further. But have such efforts to be relevantto the times been propitious for Judaism’s future, or have they been a cause of the decline? I recall a conversation with an older friend, a retired Reform rabbi, who stated his discomfort when walking through the corridors of the temple where he had long served hearing the sound of Christmas carols sung by the congregation’s choir. At what point does Judaism lose its defining character? Leifer notes that there are those who conclude that the decline of Jewish commitment and affiliation can be attributed to the very accommodations social changes have wrought.

But these changes have also brought new and creative expressions of Judaism, as Leifer states, along the periphery. There are experimental forms, many brought by gay and lesbian Jews, that involve the reinvention of ritual and liturgy inclusive of music, storytelling, theater and more, much reflective of current political and social sensibilities. There is borrowing from avant-garde trends, even the syncretistic inclusion of practices from other traditions.

Clearly Leifer is admiring of the creativity. Yet even here, in an effort to transform Judaism in tune with current values and political movements, he remains uncertain and discomforted, and his misgivings go to the heart of his thesis.

The problem with contemporary Judaism is not its appropriation of new forms. The dynamics run much deeper and reach far beyond internal Jewish issues. The problem is the primacy of individualism that defines American life. It is a reality that Leifer often repeats:

“…for most of Judaism’s existence, being Jewish meant recognizing Judaism’s binding framework, even if one struggles with, bristled at, or neglected, whether with guilt or relish, its stipulations. Contemporary Jewish life, by contrast, appears to rest on a roughly opposite axiom. While most American Jews describe themselves as proud to be Jewish, they also seem to believe that such a declaration exists independent of any set of obligations-that it requires no adherence, let alone knowledge, of Jewish law. Jewishness today has become more of an identity to be possessed than a coherent set of practices. Self -gratification and individual preference have supplanted commandedness and commitment to community.”

“It is the liberal-individualist mentality-not queer inclusion or gender egalitarianism-that is responsible for mainline affiliated Judaism’s demise.”

Leifer has gotten it exactly right. It is as if Robert Putnam and his thesis proffered in Bowling Alone is looking over Leifer’ shoulder. In my view, American society is characterized by hyper-individualism that has led to the breakdown of organizational and institutional affiliation of all types, including religious ones. Leifer does reference the meteoric decline of Protestant churches, noting that some scholars estimate that 6,000 to 10,000 churches close down every year. Sociologically, synagogues are subject to precisely the same forces.

While Leifer is clearly intrigued with the creativity of new expressions of Judaism he has his doubts in a way that reveals the internal nature of his own Jewish commitments and what he believes Judaism needs to be. He closes his book with a sentiment which I understand and with which, in a broader sense, I completely concur. In a manner that is admirably revealing, Leifer notes as follows:

“Most of all, I have become convinced of the radical potential of traditional Judaism…I believe that a life centered on the commandments, on mitzvot, is a good life in and of itself. In our current moment, it is also a profoundly and radically countercultural one…Judaism is a religion of limits and obligation- two concepts utterly opposed to the dominant currents of contemporary life. Our liberal capitalist culture celebrates boundless growth, infinite choice, and instant gratification. Traditional Judaism, by contrast, teaches the merits of long term commit, patience and restraint, and commitment with one’s lot.

Whereas liberal capitalism glorifies the individual while condemning him to an atomized and isolated existence, traditional Judaism requires that life be lived with and for others-in obligated community.”

“Especially in times like ours, I understand that these may seem like conservative values. In a sense, they are. But I have arrived to them through my left-wing convictions, not despite them.”

“To be clear, I don’t think embracing tradition means relinquishing important progressive commitments such as feminism, anti-racism, or opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It simply means realizing these commitments differently.”

Here I completely agree. There can be no freedom without restraint. There can be no freedom for oneself without obligation and responsibility to others and to higher, more enduring, values. There can be no individual without community. It is such commitments that deepen life’s meaning. And so, Joshua Leifer has not headed for the exit. He has chosen to recommit himself to his Judaism, its practices and obligations,and to Israel, and fight whatever battles that need to be fought from the inside. Whether he will find others like him in sufficient numbers to ensure the Jewish future, he has left us with many reasons to doubt.

Leifer’s treatment of Orthodox Judaism is relegated to a single chapter. It deals primarily with the Haredi community in Lakewood, New Jersey, from which his wife comes. He is admiring of the Haredi devotion to transcendent values, to community and family. But clearly he refutes the parochialism and conservatism that are constitutive of what he finds in Lakewood. Oddly a major omission in Leifer’s study is a discussion of modern Orthodoxy, which in many places is vibrant and thriving. My childhood synagogue was the Queens Jewish Center in Forest Hills. It was the first of what is now a row of a dozen Orthodox synagogues and yeshivas that line 108^th street in my old neighborhood. The suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey, where I worked for 50 years, is home to perhaps 15 Orthodox shuls. It is one of several communities in the New York area where modern Orthodoxy is growing.

As noted, Leifer views American Judaism through a sociological and historical lens. He does not deal with the philosophical and metaphysical underpinning of Jewish belief. Conventionally, Judaism is seen primarily as dealing with behavior, the living out of the mitzvot. But belief cannot be fully discounted. At a minimum, Judaic commitment requires at least a belief that something not of this world occurred on Sinai. Jewish liturgy is inextricably theocentric, and metaphorical reinterpretation can only be applied so far. For me, belief in God, or rather the absence of it, has raised radical questions as to how I construe and construct my Jewish identity. Leifer does not engage issues of belief and, in my view, his work would be more complete if he had.

Despite these omissions, Tablets Shattered will generate extensive discussion within the Jewish community. It is worthy of much attention. And rightly so. It could not be more relevant to the contemporary Jewish experience in America. It is written with sophistication and in a powerful style. It is erudite but personal and admirably honest. Leifer is committed to speaking the truth as he sees it and without reservation. And given our fraught times and the volatility of the moment, Leifer’s thesis also partakes of courage.