Tablets Shattered

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

De: Joshua Leifer

Narrado por: Eli Schiff

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

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

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

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

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

©2024 Joshua Leifer (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered is both a history of Judaism in America and a cri de coeur from a heartbroken member of the tribe."—The New York Times, Editors' Choice

“One of the book’s strengths is its abil­i­ty to cor­ral many diverse Jew­ish voic­es. . . . Read­ers will leave Leifer’s book feel­ing that Amer­i­can Judaism is less a shat­tered tablet and more a rich tapes­try with plen­ty of flaws and the capac­i­ty for real beauty.”—Jewish Book Council

"Leifer has precisely limned the nature of his own predicament as a young American Jewish intellectual....[a] frequently insightful and elegantly written book."—Jewish Review of Books

Essential read for the foundation of the Jewish future

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

The whole story and insights

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

Terrific book with an unfortunate narration issue

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

Fantastic, introspective — Important for Millenials and Gen Z

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