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

Joshua Leifer, Eli Schiff

eAudio - 2024

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 polit...ical 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... more