Tablets Shattered

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

By: Joshua Leifer

Narrated by: Eli Schiff

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

Critic reviews

"The author does not shy away from blunt criticism of numerous politicians and personalities who have shaped his own sense of dissent and stirred the anger of fellow young progressive Jews—an anger that only grows as the present conflict continues to claim thousands of lives. In a candid, intellectual...book, Leifer pulls no punches."
—Kirkus

“Tablets Shattered contains more wisdom, empathy, and eloquence about the past and present of Jews in the U.S. and in Israel than any other book I know. Both sobering and inspiring, it is an extraordinary work that might even help lead us to a more decent future.”
—Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and professor of history at Georgetown University

“If the drama of Jewish life is convulsion and reconstitution, now it is American Jewry’s turn, with the shattering of a century-long synthesis that gave our community its unity. In the best of Jewish traditions, journalist and scholar Joshua Leifer has emerged as an essential voice in chronicling this process and sensing its opportunities, and not just its risks. Following his own family’s story, Leifer eloquently documents that neither the centrist liberalism, nor the default Zionism, nor the exceptionalist patriotism of American Jewry’s history predetermines its future. “
—Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, and author of Liberalism Against Itself

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!

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.

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.