In new book, journalist Joshua Leifer offers a scathing take on American Judaism

(RNS) — In journalist Joshua Leifer’s new book, a sweeping historical account of American Judaism, is an impassioned indictment of a fractured and contentious religious tradition. His central charge is that Judaism is hampered by its embrace of Zionism, which has become a substitute for the faith itself.

It was therefore ironic that last week, a Brooklyn bookstore canceled a book talk with Leifer, where he was slated to discuss “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” with a prominent Reform rabbi. The reason for the cancellation? The rabbi’s professed Zionism. (The book talk was later rescheduled and took place earlier this week at another venue.)

In his book, which spans an entire century, Leifer, 30, now a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University, describes how many 20th-century Jews, escaping pogroms in Europe, settled in America and for the most part shed their religious traditions and embraced Americanism, becoming highly successful hyphenated Americans. After 1967, they increasingly found in Zionism and support for Israel a substitute for religious faith and tradition.

Over the past 50 years, the most important religious Jewish establishment organizations, initially set up to fight discrimination and champion equal rights, shifted their focus to Israel advocacy. Groups such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations became subsumed with an unconditional — and often craven — support for Israel. The same became true of the liberal religious traditions that have become less moored in tradition and more in multiculturalism and syncretism.

RNS caught up with Leifer recently to talk about his book. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What lesson did you glean from the earlier book cancellation? Do you see a ban on Zionism as antisemitic?

A blanket ban on anyone considered a Zionist is in effect antisemitic because it bars the vast majority of Jews from the stage. It also reflects the elimination of nuance and of complexity from the public discussion. Zionism means different things to different people.

In your book you take on Jewish institutions very forcefully for their unconditional support of Israel. How have they reacted to it?

One of the ironies of the event cancellation is that establishment groups that had been very reluctant to have contact with the book actually began to reach out. So that has been a little bit of a surprise. But it’s also frustrating, because these mainstream Jewish organizations that seized on the cancellation have themselves cast out critics of Israeli policy for years, and continue to ignore what has been at the center of my work: the immorality and destructiveness of Israel’s occupation.

The thrust of your book is that Zionism has become the center of American Jewish life to the point that it superseded the Torah and the Commandments. Tell me why you think that happened.

A lot of American Jews were enthralled with Israel after its victory in the Six Day War, in which it occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula (which it later gave up). The image of a strong, militarily powerful, victorious Israel resonated so much for American Jews at that time, in part because of the proximity to the Holocaust and the lived memory of Jewish near-extermination.

People were also looking for a way to define their Jewishness in terms that had not been available previously. The older forms of Jewish identification prior to Israel’s founding — Yiddish secularism and more traditional Orthodoxy — weren’t really available to American Jews by the 1950s and ’60s. Most Jews who were born in America were not attached to traditional religious practice. There’s a quote that I used in the book by Irving Howe about how Israel and Zionism enabled American Jews to postpone that reconsideration of their Jewishness, which the American condition required.

You write critically of Israel, but you’re not an anti-Zionist. How do you identify?

I’m an anti-occupation Jew who wants to make Israel a real democracy. Neither Jews nor Palestinians are going anywhere. They’ll have to find one way or the other to share the land. I believe that Jews have a right to self determination and collective self determination. If that makes me a Zionist, that’s true. A lot of people who describe themselves as anti-Zionists seem to think that freeing Palestine might require that Israelis go somewhere else. I think that’s wrong and I don’t think it’s realistic. These labels obscure more than they illuminate. Some people who describe themselves as anti Zionists are described by other people as Zionists.

I read you’re moving to Israel. Why?

That’s correct. I’m moving in mid-September. My partner has Israeli citizenship. We spend a fair bit of time there during the year. That’s where our community is and also some family, and we’re committed to making Israel a democracy. And I think that’s the most important struggle right now. Part of it is ending this horrific war, opposing it and trying to get to a cease-fire. All of that is a prerequisite for a future where Israelis and Palestinians can live with equality and dignity.

You’ve gone back to embracing the notion of a two-state solution. Is that what you mean by creating a democratic Israel?

There was a time when my analysis was that a two-state solution was not very likely. It was necessary to think about alternatives. Despite all the horrific suffering and violence that’s happening right now, I actually think two states will be more feasible and more likely to guarantee equality and justice for all people. I’m much more skeptical about a one-state reality, which risks devolving into perpetual ethno-religious conflict.

You’ve been critical of the liberal Jewish denominations in the United States and suggest they haven’t really developed an alternative to Zionism.

Because Israel was so central to American Jewish identity for so long, those old questions about meaning, about what sustains community, were sort of put to the side. Now that Israel is not a source of moral inspiration, but a place that many don’t want to be associated with, or that they’re ashamed of, because of what it’s doing, American Jewish identity is facing a crisis. If it doesn’t have Zionism, but it also doesn’t have traditional practice, what does it have?

You grew up in the Conservative movement but are now more comfortable with Orthodoxy. Is that where you see yourself?

I’m very reluctant to agree to any easy labels. I ended up adopting a substantially more observant religious practice — keeping Shabbat strictly according to halakha (Jewish law), observing all the holidays, keeping kosher. And so, even though I was doing versions of them prior to now, I don’t think it would be true to say I live an Orthodox life. The term that I use is orthopraxy. What I mean by that is, I’m committed to living a life within the framework of the obligations of halakha because I think that living that kind of life offers important access to a community and takes one out of the kind of hustle and bustle of the capitalist market. That’s one of the beautiful things about observing Shabbat is that it’s a complete pause from any commercial exchange or work.

I think there’s actually something kind of radical and countercultural about traditional observance in an American culture that values being online at all times and being immediately digital and the colonization basically, of all aspects of life by work. Jewish tradition resists that. And yeah, I think that’s important.

Things are so bleak now in Israel. Is there any hope?

Yes, it’s really hard to have hope when every day we are suffused with the most horrific images of Palestinian suffering and devastation from Gaza. We know from history that sometimes very unexpected things can happen and work out for the better. Part of politics is knowing how to exploit those moments of possibility.

Just because it’s bleak now, doesn’t mean that it will be bleak forever. I don’t think it’s impossible that there could be some kind of negotiated settlement along the horizon, even if that horizon is not visible from where we are right now. You can be very pessimistic but also be very hopeful. You have to be able to continue to hope that it can be different.