Maxxe Albert-Deitch
Hello and welcome to another Americans for Peace Now webinar. I'm Maxxe Albert-Deitch, and with me is Karen Paul, our Director of Development here at APN, as well as our guest Josh Leifer. Josh is a journalist whose essays and reporting have appeared widely in international publications; that includes the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, Haaretz, and more. We are here today to talk about his new book, Tablets Shattered. It's his lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present, which is, I think, something that we are all very much living right now. A little bit about the book: formed in the middle decades of the 20th 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 anti semitism and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Josh provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life, as well as a sober conjecture about its future. Josh, it's really great to have you on, how are you doing today?
Josh Leifer
Thanks so much for having me. I'm doing okay,
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
Yeah, I think that's the best answer any of us have.
Josh Leifer
Yeah, just hanging in there, as I imagine we all are.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
Some quick housekeeping for the audience. By the way, this webinar will be recorded. You will be able to access the transcript, audio, and video from our website in a couple of days. The video will be on our YouTube channel. The audio will be on our podcast -- PeaceCast. We welcome questions. We just ask that you use the Q and A function at the bottom of your screen, rather than trying to have everybody raise your hands again. That is the Q and A box that you should be able to find at the bottom of your zoom screen. So, Josh, having just recently reread this book in anticipation of this webinar, something really big that I noticed is that you do not pull your punches. As much criticism as you have for that knee jerk indoctrination to support Israel at all costs, and what you call, in a couple of places, the replacement of American Judaism with Zionism. You're equally critical of all the ways that the left can be totally alienating for Jewish liberals who are beginning to unpack those childhood teachings. I'm just curious, is there a particular camp that you feel you or your book fit into, or are you starting to view this conversation as more of a continued search for the right balance?
Josh Leifer
That's a good question. I mean, one of the things that I wanted to do with the book, and this was true even before October 7. I mean, I started writing the book before October 7, and the first manuscript was due the week before. So much of the book's framework and argument was set up before. And in a lot of ways, I think I will feel lucky that I was where I was in the process when it happened, because in some sense, the two years roughly of writing it had kind of prepared me. Even if I was surprised by some things, and we can get into those things, I think I had been prepared more than I maybe knew for the kind of rupture / unsavory developments that were happening in the political camp that I had spent most of my adult life. But to go back to what I was saying before, from the beginning, I wanted to write a book that one was true to what I believe and think. I had increasing increasingly found myself a little bit out of step with the conventional camps of whatever you want to call it, the politics of Israel-Palestine. I think that there is a lot of policing of the boundaries of these camps and that was frustrating to me. I think my publisher was maybe a little bit more ambivalent than I was about the book, intentionally not fitting into either, easily, either one of these divisions. So obviously, you know people who are of the opinion that against the backdrop of what's happening in Gaza, the only acceptable kind of position is uncritical solidarity with Palestinian resistance, like those people aren't going to like the book and aren't going to read it. And then also, the people who, against the backdrop what's happening in Gaza, think that the the Jewish position is to cheer, should be to cheer on the IDF -- those people aren't going to like the book and and that, I think, was intentional. I'd like to think that there are a lot of people who don't fall into either of those camps and aren't being represented in both American Jewish discourse and American Left-wing discourse and American discourse generally. I hope that, like those people find, even if they disagree with some other parts of the book, find maybe something to hold on to a little bit.
Karen Paul
So, you actually mentioned your publisher. As I was preparing to be on the on the on this call with you, I wanted to go back and look to see who your publisher was. Because, as we all know, or many of us know, that there's a lot of there are a lot of issues in the publishing industry, in the literary community, around Jewish writers, and around just Israel-Gaza in general. And I think kind of the elephant in the room, of course, is what happened in Brooklyn early in the summer. Could you talk a little bit more about what happened at the bookstore with Rabbi Andy Bachman and how it has been, what the publishing journey has been like for you, even though you started writing the book before this current moment and where it's taken you/
Josh Leifer
Sure, I mean, I think I've spoken a lot about the the bookstore episode, and, you know, it got a lot of headlines, the story is very simple. It's roughly an hour before the launch event was scheduled. A bookstore employee, I guess maybe looked up Andy Bachmann for the first time, and he had been approved as the moderator beforehand, and then I got a call from my publicist who said the bookstore has concerns, he's a Zionist. At first, the request was like, can you make sure the conversation...can you make sure you steer the conversation and that he doesn't say anything inflammatory? And I was like, I don't think that's going to be a problem at all. But sure, you know, presumably, the person who is working at this adult store, has read the book, and so they know where I stand on things, and they should trust that the conversation will, you know, be a productive, generative one. And then a half hour before the event was scheduled, we I got another call saying that the bookstore employee was just not willing to have Andy Bachman appear on stage at the event, and I went to that store and spoke to the employee, and that was made clear again. And the grounds of of her opposition to Andy were also made clear that was, and she said this bluntly, was that it's because he's a Zionist and they don't want Zionists on stage at the bookstore. My wife, who is a lawyer, had the good sense to make sure that this exchange was recorded. And she was just like, this is important, and I but I genuinely wanted to know what the what the bookstore employee meant by this designation. But there wasn't really a conversation there to be had. I mean, in general, I think that, as with the many things in American political life, the politics of Israel-Palestine and the meaning of Zionism have been simplified, hollowed out, stripped of nuance, and it's very, very frustrating. This was an examplebecause obviously it's related to the delegitimization of anyone who believes in Jewish collective self determination. But I think it reflects an even maybe larger scale phenomenon that's happening, not only in this area, but in other areas of American public life.
Karen Paul
And what's been the fallout? Have you found larger audiences other places, and I assume it hasn't shut you down in any way?
Josh Leifer
No, I don't feel shut down at all. In some sense, the target audience of the book did shift a little bit from pre October 7 launch, where, when we imagined the book largely being in conversation with progressive, younger inquiries into identity and meaning in America, to a largely, if not almost exclusively, Jewish conversation that's taking place in synagogues and with groups like APN and other and other people kinds of communal organizations that are investeddirectly in Israel and the fate of the Jewish people and of Judaism. In a lot of ways, that makes sense. I think maybe there was some over optimistic marketing aspirations before. I mean, if there is an irony, it is that I was worried in the stages of writing and editing the book that Jewish communal organizations would be reluctant to host conversations with me because of my strident criticism of the occupation and the siege of Gaza and the war. And that hasn't really been true. And I think it's, it's whether you want to say thanks or due to the bookstore situation, I have been, I think, surprised by the welcome that I've found in certain Jewish spaces where I certainly, two and a half years ago, would not have expected to be speaking.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
There's question in the Q and A that I'm going to actually bring in a little bit early, but I think Karen and I have been talking about this book, and we've both read it very recently, it's been very front of mind, and I introduced it, but I didn't give you a chance to introduce it a little bit in your own words, and to give our watchers and listeners a chance to sort of hear about it from you. So would you mind giving us just a quick introduction of your book?
Josh Leifer
Absolutely. I mean, I think at its broadest, the book is about how we got to where we are. It's about the collapse of the American Jewish consensus, which I chart as having formed in the post war period, but were rather crystallized in the post war period. Although some of the pillars that I identify took shape earlier, and as as you mentioned in your in your introduction, those pillars, as I understand them, were Americanism, Zionism and liberalism. By Americanism, I mean a certain kind of American Jewish exceptionalism that views America as an exceptionally good country, as confirmed by its treatment of Jews. That's first because of the comparatively hospitable environment that Jewish immigrants find in America, having escaped oppression and pogroms in Europe. And then through the post war period, because of the comparison between how Jews are treated in the US vis a vis our co religionists in the Soviet Union. And then, of course, as America emerges on the world stage as Israel's guarantor; as kind of the guardian of the Jewish people in the realm of geopolitics. Zionism, as I refer to it in the book, is less this question of right to exist/not right to exist/State/no state/one state/two states, but is actually almost a kind of cultural formation in American Jewish life, in which American Jews see Israel as a moral beacon, a source of moral inspiration, and also as the culmination of all 2000 years of Jewish history. So everything was...the idea that everything was meant to culminate in this specific state. And then liberalism the third pillar. I don't mean liberal politics. I actually mean liberal religion. I and I probably should have come up with a better term for this, and it's the one that's gotten in the most trouble, as I've as I've gone about discussing it. But by liberal religion, I mean basically a way of engaging with Jewish practice that's firstly individualist, rather than, say, a focus on the community, that's voluntarist, that its logic is about is based on choice, rather than, say, divine command. And then three, that's pluralist, tolerant, maybe even relativist. And what I mean by that is that American Jews, for the most part, don't think that there's one way to practice Judaism, and don't feel that they have the right to tell other people how to practice Judaism. Those are important and salutary shifts that happened in American Jewish life, but there's also a downside to them, which is that a lot of American Jews also have a hard time explaining to their children why it's important them for for them to be Jews, and why it's important for them to live Jewish lives, as opposed to other kinds of lives they might live. And if the two other pillars, Americanism and Zionism, kind of crumbled from without, if you want to say as in political events in the world overwhelmed them. I think the liberalism was one that kind of crumbled from within. It was something that allowed, in a lot of ways, American Jewish life to flourish, but then eventually began began to hamper American Jewish flourishing.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
There's something that you said a little bit earlier that I want to tug on. I want to talk specifically about the afterward, because, as you mentioned earlier, you didn't start writing this book on October 8, 2023 I mean, you've been working on this for easily a couple of years by that point, and you were already grappling with these issues that have become so front of mind, so spotlit, and the afterword of your book is so striking because it deals exactly with how much the reactions from both the American Left and the American Jewish community have been jolting. They've been surprising in these months that have followed. Can you take us through the experience of editing and publishing and publicizing this book? And you mentioned this a little bit earlier as well, that there was a plan, and then that plan had to change dramatically. Can you just take us through that process?
Josh Leifer
Sure. We had to make judgment calls in in real time. The situation has been very dynamic. So, you know, the immediate reaction on October 8 or October 12, when the horrors of Hamas' attack are still front of mind is different than, say, where we're at in January, when the kind of full-scale destruction of the Gaza Strip is on display, and if through those months, I'm still editing the book. At first, my initial reaction, what to my publisher was no way, we'll just slap an editor's note at the beginning of this. And what can I do? Like, it's not, it didn't work out that way, but this, but, you know, it was October, these books get planned very far in advance. The book was already scheduled to be published in in August, and my publisher and agent said, no, no, you must rework this, because you're this is going to be one of the first post October 7 books, and you have a chance now to at least try. You can't rewrite the whole book, and obviously the book would be very different, and I had started writing it on October 8, but there must be things ... you have to update it. And so, like I said, one one part of updating it was just grappling with the catastrophe that's unfolded in Gaza and making and making that clear the book, though, had also been very critical already, of the American Jewish establishment on Israel. I think that having reported on these matters for many, for several years, like I regret that a lot of the warnings that me and other had given like came true, and our worst predictions, the things that we thought would happen when the current government was elected and then sworn in the preceding winter, basically all happened. There was less that needed to be updated there. But where things did need to be updated was, of course, with regards to some of the changes that took place on the American left, and specifically on the American Jewish left. I will admit that the political direction did surprise me, because I realized in those moments that I had perhaps misunderstood the nature of the project that I thought I had been a part of, which was one of "connected criticism" to use the philosopher Michael Walzer, is language that we at the people in the Jewish left were part of this broader community/people, and we wanted to change their minds about something we thought that they were making, and are still making -- a grave mistake. Yes, the criticisms were strident, and I think you know to positively frame them would be they were at times prophetic, but at least in my mind, there wasn't this idea of disavowal that became, I think, much more pervasive in the months following October 7. And by by disavowal, I mean this current of parts of the millennial,younger Jewish left that says something like we're Jewish, but actually, we disavow those other Jews. We don't want anything to do with them. Our Judaism is...almost like... I think this is not, this doesn't make their their politics unique at all. I think this is a structure of feeling that's that's widespread among American progressives, which is my first reaction to injustice that I'm implicated in, is I want to clean my hands. I don't want to be implicated in this. My starting point in understanding the nature of the kind of political intervention that I wanted to make was...the starting point was implication. I am implicated in this. I can't not be implicated this. It's from the experience, the feeling, the frustration of implication, that the moral urgency of my critique emerges. That position that I try to stake out in the afterward of the book, I think is much, just much less shared than I thought it was, among, among people that I had been, you know, spending time around. I also think that the position that I'm articulating, maybe this is just wishful thinking, is also one that is more widely shared by by a lot of American Jews, in the sense of feeling, on the one hand, depressed, demoralized, frightened by seeing like what's happening in the the streets of American life, but also being ashamed and horrified by what Israel is doing in Gaza and like that position, I think has just not found very prominent articulation anywhere -- not to use this phrase -- I think there's probably a silent majority of American Jews who feel that way.
Karen Paul
Yeah, that's actually a very interesting point. So in addition to delving into your own personal history in the book, you also it's meticulously researched, which makes it feel both very grounded in reality and also quite fresh in terms of texts on popular texts and academic texts in Israel and Palestine. Could you tell us a little bit about your research process and what brought you to your subject, and what questions you were asking yourself as you got there, and how you found your way to the particular interviews and people that you leaned on for the book.
Josh Leifer
I mean, that's a big question, because, as you said, there are a lot. There are a few things well, I mean, this is a little bit more of a this is you asked a writerly question. So I'm going to have to respond in a writerly manner, which is that popular, as opposed to academic, non fiction is actually for realistically, rather conserved. And what I mean by that is that people want to read a story, and they want to read a narrative. And when I first conceived of the book, I was actually approached to write it. I had not pitched it because my editor was looking for someone to write about the millennial Jewish disillusionment with Israel, and they ended up settling on me, even though there were other people and my first proposal actually was declined because it was too political. It was about the fights over the ADL and AIPAC, and my editor said, you need the searching element to be here. At first I was going to use activists and various characters in a kind of journalistic profile way that was how the initial that's how the proposal that was sold, framed things. There were going to be a few main characters in each chapter. So, you know, Rabbi Amichai Levi is it makes a prominent appearance in the chapter about liberal Judaism. Sophie Elman Golan makes a big appearance in the in the chapter about kind of the New York millennial left. Naftali Muster makes an appearance in the in the chapter about Ultra-Orthodoxy. But as I went about writing the the the book. I started writing the book in August 2021 -- that's when I earnestly began reporting for it, and it was published in, what is it? August, 2024, so long time. Three years is a long time. And lot changed. A lot changed in my life, but it also as I was working on it, and my editor made the suggestion of, why don't you put yourself into this? Because it's obvious that you're connected to all of these things in different ways. And that was true. Living in New York, I knew people like Sophie and and Amichai personally, and my social circles were adjacent to them, and when it came to describing things like If Not Now a group that many friends of mine are have been very involved in and now I was involved in with myself when I was in college, it made more sense to kind of make it personal, both because it seemed like it might be easier to pull people in that way, and also because there wasn't really any journalistically honest way to write about these things, other than to be like "Well, I was there at that protest," " I was there during that conversation." Then as that happened, I zoomed out to capture this wider family story. And the book begins with my great grandmother's arrival in America and and part of the reason why I did that one again, was formalistic. But it also happens to be the case that I think in a lot of ways, this is the branch of my family is very representative of a certain kind of American Jewish experience. It just so happens to be that that this side of the family perfectly matches the lower east side to the Bronx, to the suburbs to Westchester move, and that my grandmother, my Bubbe, was in the workman circle, which is where she met my grandfather and my father went to that camp, but then They became kind of swept up in the in the 80s Jewish Renaissance, and they lived on the Upper West Side. Whatever there was, like a lot of it was, it was, I got very lucky in that way that my upbringing and my parent and my family story charted this very familiar trajectory. And so I wanted to bring it into the book. But of course, family is not enough. And so one of the things that I went about doing was trying to bring in as many literary and historical sources that I can to, you know, show that like this wasn't, this isn't just my family, it is also my family story, but it could be your family story. And I think that, and the last thing I'll say on this is maybe just a little bit provocative, but is that over the last decade or so, we've gotten very accustomed, and for good reason, to wanting to search out the the marginal stories, the Forgotten stories, the less represented stories. But I actually thought, well, I'm going to do something a little bit counterintuitive with the book, and I'm going to tell this story that I think represents a lot of American Jews, but that has kind of fallen away for some reason, and I think that that's been detrimental to our own self understanding about the nature of the challenges that we face. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers exactly your question. But those are some of that's some of the process related elements to this.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
I think it's fascinating that it started from a place of looking for that younger adult Jewish understanding of basically what the hell is happening and how we got here because, to me, when I was reading it, I'm sorry, we've asked you a writer question. I'm going to ask you a reader question now. In reading it, the book, to me, feels very much like an entry into a growing and I think, new canon of nuanced Israel-Palestine, identity politics literature intended for younger adults. I mean, it fits so neatly into that category, and I'm thinking about films like Israelism some of Eric Alterman and Sandy Tolen's work. What are some of the pieces of literature that you find yourself intentionally engaging with, or that you see Tablets Shattered as being in conversation with or on the same shelf as?
Josh Leifer
That's a really good question. It's funny, because one of the challenges...not to evade the reader with the writer question. But one of the hard things about the book is that I still am in a PhD program, and my... whatever... training, if you want to say that is, is as a historian and an academic historian, and that is a very different kind of writing than this kind of writing. And it was one of the, probably the hardest thing about the book, was writing in this way that was going to meet people and speak to people and provide a narrative. I think this will sound a little bit counterintuitive, but the book that I began wanting to almost respond to was Ari Shavit's "My Promised Land." Now that book is immensely frustrating to me, even as it's also deeply...it's very engaging...like you can read it in one sitting. And to me, that book created what, to me, that book ended up finding an audience because it gave American Jews a way to think about something that they were uncomfortable thinking about, namely the Nakba. Like the most famous chapter in that book is the chapter about Lod/Lyyda. And I have, I have critiques of it and have written critiques of the conclusion that he comes to, but he was meeting a need among people to understand their own situation. And he ends that book, kind of, he ends that book imagining what would happen to his ...what would what the lives of his children or grandchildren would be like if his very famous descendant or ancestor, I think whose name is Norman Bentwich, had stayed in England. And I thought, okay, I'm writing of the book from the position of the people who, like my I am the grandchild who got left in America, basically, who got left in the diaspora. So I'm not writing "My Promised Land," but I'm writing a book for those of us who are..well, I'm actually talking from Tel Aviv, but we can talk about that too..but like writing the book from the position of people who are not who's who's ancestors didn't make the jump to Israel, and have to come up with a way of finding a meaningful Jewish life In the diaspora. So that's one that's one book. I'm trying to think of others...you put me on the you put me on the spot. I mean, I was in conversation with a lot of different streams of streams of writing. I mean, one of the things that I also realized when I was writing the book was that there is a shortage of... let me back up and give it even like a wider thing...In the like 50s, 60s, 70s, there were very popular, maybe even best selling, paperback books of the Jewish theology that were sold, like FSG published Heschel's writing. There was Shokan, which had a whole set of you know, Kafka's catalog, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber. These were serious thinkers who found a wide audience among an educated reading public about Jewish -- I hate this, because this is the book that this is the category my book falls under -- Jewish spirituality. It gets, like, tucked away in there with, like, the JPS tanakh category.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
That's the category that they put you in?
Josh Leifer
Yeah, I mean, in some bookstores, but yeah, people don't know what to do with it, and that's they shove it there. And then, for some reason that I still haven't figured out, serious books for thinking people about religion disappeared, basically, and I wanted to write a book that would kind of fill this gap that I saw being filled by people who maybe I disagreed with politically, or who were coming from other faith traditions, for educated people who wanted to think critically about religion, I mean one of what like, I'm not the first person to say this, but for American Jews are on the whole, highly educated, critical thinking people, boundary pushing people, except usually when it comes to religion, where there's a kind of shutdown and defensiveness or thinness, sometimes, like the other books that are well known on the Jewish spirituality shelf are like self help kind of books. And so, I wanted to...I wasn't going to mimic them, because I am just a journalist, but I wanted to kind of pay homage in a certain way, to this high, middle brow genre of Jewish writing about religion that has sort of gone away. So yeah, those are the kind of two things that that I, that I had in mind.
Karen Paul
I just, I want to read one of the questions that came in. We have a few. But just to let you know that we have one, viewer who is very impressed at what you've written at a comparatively young age, and his temple, is going to spend a whole year discussing your book.
Josh Leifer
I'm honored.
Karen Paul
Definitely reaching...definitely reaching into the community. I'm going to move away from this sort of highbrow questions that we've prepared to ask you, but I'm. Because you mentioned something a few sentences ago. You've moved to Tel Aviv. You've moved to Israel. And I think it would be interesting to hear about what drove that choice, and did it come as a result of writing this book? Is it in response to what you have researched and learned? And where does that leave you in sort of this post, 10/11, world.
Josh Leifer
Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. Yeah. I know I was like, it's been a year. How is that possible? But I mean, the move was planned, unfortunately, editors, and I know this because I was an editor, love to choose the most provocative thing you can get. So, when I talked to Eitan for the Haaretz interview and to hear that I was moving back, that got that got made the title of the Haaretz profile, but the truth is that the decision to move back was something that my wife and I had made together a long time ago for a range of reasons that are both personal, ideological. We met in Jerusalem, and she, as I talked in the book, grew up in a Haredi community in New Jersey, but spent most of her, all of her adult life, basically in Israel. And we met through mutual friends who were involved in the vibrant anti occupation scene in Jerusalem. I had lived in Israel for a couple years as well, and I had worked at 972 and felt very comfortable in the Israeli left milieu. And we both felt that one of the most frustrating things about being far away, and this was before October 7, is that in America, you kind of get the meta discourse about Israel-Palestine, and your arguments are like, what can you say, and what can't you say, and what should you think about, and what shouldn't you think? And there's, there's, there are real limits on on the kinds of political, forms of political engagement that one can be involved in. And because, I mean, she much more than I was in. She was, I'm a journalist, and she was involved in and kind of direct action solidarity with Palestinians, mainly in the South Hebron Hills, are thinking, before October 7 was it just makes sense for us to go back, because it's where our political community is, and it's where I think the biggest impact that we can make in the political struggle that We're committed to is. Post October 7, I think that felt...that feeling felt even more acute because and we were back in Israel, often even after the seventh we were here in December, January, and then we came back in the summer. And I don't say this flippantly, but it there is something easier about being a Jewish leftist in Israel, which is that when you go to a protest, you generally don't have to worry that there are people there who want to harm the people you love or destroy the State of Israel. And so, it feels like you can focus on like the thing at hand. And I see in one of the comments here about, should we spend our enemies feeling betrayed by the American Jewish left, or should we focus our attention on the dangers of the Jewish right? And I'm like, Yeah, I agree. I am very tired of talking about the feeling of betrayal as acute as it is, I would much prefer to be fighting with my adversaries on on the right, and I would much rather be trying to get people who and other realms of their life are thoughtful, caring people, to care about the loss of Palestinian life and the dehumanization of Palestinians and the destruction of the Gaza Strip like, that's the fight that I wanted to be fighting, and I did not Want to have to be fighting this kind of rear guard struggle against anti semitism, basically, which to go back to the book for a second, is one of the things that I ended up adding, you know, after October 7. Not immediately, but also, but also immediately in the months following, through conversations with my editor and other people, it became clear, like, I can't publish this book and not have anything to say about anti semitism. So, there's a section that I added there. But yeah, I mean, I think you know the move. So, the move is both ideological and it's personal and it was also born out of the long of the years of reporting where I think that if you read, but maybe not so much, read between the lines, one of the places the book ends up with, which is that if you want to live a thick committed almost like total Jewish life, you don't have that many options in the United States, and the options that you do have are very are very demanding, are very confining. And the struggle, you know, whether we like it or not, and this is how I phrase it in the book, because, you know, I think, and I'm and I'm willing to understand, I can even understand this on the part of some people, a certain ambivalence. But whether we like it or not, the developments that are happening in Israel have an effect to the way that American Jews live, and so if you want to be deep in the fight over the struggle for the Jewish future, it felt like it was necessary to be here. So that's like a long-winded way of answering that question.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
I'm really glad that you've brought up your experience as a journalist a couple of times. I mean, you've basically been doing three completely different forms of writing continuously for three years because you're well on your way to a history PhD. That I know from my own experience in a history grad program is a very, very specific form of writing, very specific structures that for the most part you have to adhere to. Journalism is its own, again, very specific way of writing and presenting information very much in the present. And then this book, which I feel like "Tablet Shattered," falls somewhere in the middle. I think that a lot of popular nonfiction does. What you seeing having been enmeshed in all of these kinds of writing, and in your case, dealing so specifically with Israel and Palestine as the way that this period may end up being remembered years down the line. I mean, what are the differences that you're seeing between how we talk about it in the present, versus how you ended up framing things for your book, versus the way that history books tend to frame things in that academic context.
Josh Leifer
I mean, that's a great question. That's something I do; I think about a lot. Part of and part of what's so been so hard for me as a writer across these different genres, is that October 7 was an event, but it also meant that it's still ongoing, as in, the war is still ongoing, its consequences are still ongoing. And so I found it hard often to write because I don't know where I don't know where this is going to end. I don't know what comes at the end of this, this process. Sometimes I'm I hear the argument that people make that this is an absolute turning point, and nothing will ever be the same, and, and there's no coming back from this. And then I think, well, that's also what people said in 2008 and it's also what people said in 2014, and I wish that weren't the case as in I wish we weren't it wasn't so easy for the world to move on from catastrophic violence. But if you if we put a dispassionate historian head on for a minute, like, that's something that the world does very well, actually. And so I can't know right now what the consequences of this war are going to be. You know, something that I have had in mind, and maybe I will write it, but depends, not a subsequent but another book about the kind of crisis of the crisis of Israeli politics to basically, kind of beginning with the Long Netanyahu elections cycles into the judicial overhaul and then moving forward. And one of the things that I you know, just was thinking about today, reading the news here, is like, you know, I would hope that the consequences of this war might lead Israelis to realize that they cannot continue to maintain the occupation, and there is no other choice but to reach some kind of diplomatic territorial compromise. But I also am very afraid that we'll look back on this moment and it'll. Be like this is when Israel went from being a very flawed, impartial democracy inside the green line and military dictatorship over the green line to like, full on fascist autocracy inside the green line and military dictatorship over the green line. But I mean, this is something we can't know in advance. I think a lot a lot of a lot about it, like, what, how will this period, you know, be remembered? I think it's certainly been a turning point in terms of the American Jewish discourse, probably akin to nothing other than 1967 like when you look at the way that you know for and I think there are people were making a lot of comparisons to the DNC, because it was in Chicago, 1968 to 2024 obviously, that there were that didn't happen, like there wasn't a Redux of 1968 but I think there are similarities in terms of the way that a war in Israel-Palestine had a fracturing effect on a progressive movement that seemed to be at a high ebb, that led to a lot of very important changes in American Jewish politics, Like the 1967 version...remains to be seen where we're going to be after this. I mean, it's also very depressing, like when you put on the historian hat, rather than like, the journalist hat is always saying, what's new, what's changing? Where is the rupture here? And the historian hat is always saying, where is their continuity? Where? What are the long processes and structures here. And what's really depressing is you could copy paste the arguments that Jewish radicals were having with black radicals in the wake of the Six Day War, almost one to one. Obviously, there were some differences, because what Israel is doing is different, but it's almost like there is a structure of politics here that's old, relatively, like half a century, basically, and it's just kind of something we have to live within and alongside, rather than continually expecting some kind of cathartic resolution.
Karen Paul
You've sort of answered some of the questions that have come in, sort of thinking about it was the corrosiveness of the occupation and Israel's reputation in the world now as a rogue state, as pariah in some way, and how we as American progressive Jews are thinking about this, and that it's very depressing. And one, one of the questions, various point blank, is, do you consider yourself a Zionist? And how do we cope with that today in on the side of the ocean? I guess
Josh Leifer
My go to answer has been, if by Zionist you mean committed to Jewish collective self determination, then yes, I'm a Zionist. If by Zionist you mean occupation and conquest and apartheid, then no, I'm not a Zionist. And I think that there's been a mutual, unintentional conspiracy between like the the Jewish right in Israel and America and the far left around the world that are both committed to the idea that Jewish collective self determination and democracy and equality are incompatible. I don't think they are inherently incompatible, even if, in their actualization right now, there's a pretty big contradiction. And so I think, you know, it has it's very unpopular to say this, but I think it's necessary to be like, I don't accept that this is the way that things have to be. There's something like, I'm not willing to to it's not just to give up on this. I'm not willing to accept that the Jewish collective self determination requires the oppression of another people. There are very prominent people in American Jewish life who've started to say this, like, we're disappointed that American Jews care about social justice because they've given up on caring about their own people. And I'm like, That's the dumbest way to think about this. Excuse my bluntness here. No, you want to say these things, they have to be compatible. We have to make them compatible. They're not compatible. Then, yeah, then then that's then, that's the horizon of, our politics. I mean, one of this is, this is related to like that, that question about, you know, how to describe my form of Zionism. I think of it for political both because of the way that the American mainstream, American Jewish community, has been relatively inhospitable to dissent and all. So because of what's happened in Israeli political life, people who were writing within or thinking within the Zionist intellectual tradition, let's say, have been kind of moved out of it in various ways. So if you know you were to, if someone were to take on the politics of a Martin Buber or even a Hannah Arendt, who are both people who are in different ways, engaging deeply with the dilemmas of Jewish politics and Jewish self-determination, most people who are gatekeepers in American Jewish life would not view those as Zionist politics. I happen to, like, draw a lot of inspiration from those kinds of thinkers, and I think we could all, I'm all due to read more of them. But, but yeah, so you know, that would be my answer to that question.
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
I mean, there's so much truth to what you're saying on so many levels, the idea of that definition of Zionism being both much more nuanced and much larger than what it's been condensed down to in popular discussion, I want to come back to the book for a little bit here, when I immediately finished the book and went to go log in on Goodreads, as you do, the first review that I read called it equal parts candid, intellectual and pessimistic, and that's a description that stuck with me so hard, because I found it, very descriptive, but only partially accurate. I think that in as many ways as you paint a pretty bleak picture of what's happened to the relationships between American Judaism and liberalism, and Americanism and Zionism, I find that the end of the book ultimately still feels hopeful. I think that you're still pointing us down that road towards nuanced conversation and nuanced engagement with these issues. How do you feel about the way that that book ends and the direction that you're pointing your readers?
Josh Leifer
It's funny. I think I forget who said this, it's one of these kinds of cliches. But I like it. It's like there's a difference between being optimism and hopeful. You can be a very pessimistic person and also be a hopeful person. And I think that, you know, obviously certain objective, materialist reads of what's happening, the reality American, Jewish life as our Palestine...I find it very hard to take a optimistic conclusion from those things at the same time, I think that you have...Hope is the basis of, like, continuing to live in the world, and so there isn't really, there isn't really any other choice. I mean, I this is something that I fight with myself every day about, maybe we should just give up, maybe it is over. Maybe the things that we hope for are not attainable, but I think that giving up is worse than then fighting and losing, I guess. I also think part of the way, the reason why the book ends that way is I was worried that people were going to read the book. And some people have or read it as a nostalgic book. There was an essay by the journalist Franklin Fuller that came out that was that charts some similar historical territory. He titles his essay, I think that the. "Golden age of American Jewry is ending". I think what I wanted to argue, even if I didn't do it as clearly as I should have, was that the period that people take uncritically as a golden age actually had a lot of drawbacks, and even if the current moment is very hard, whether it's because of polarization or political extremism or pessimism, the end of that enforced consensus actually might pose some more opportunities. The conversations that I've had, including this one to me, are confirming of that there is more opportunity. And I can't remember the last time, it was probably more than a decade in the time between. The last time I had a conversation about, like, the need to think about Zionism in a more textured, nuanced way, that that doesn't give up on the possibility of Jewish self determination, like it's been a very long time since I had this conversation that now I've been having them again because of the book, and that there is an audience for it has been, you know, that's also been encouraging, and that and that there are American, Jewish communities that are willing to engage with the book is also encouraging, which is something that I, I think, if I were to do a little bit of heshbon nefesh about, like my last, I don't know, years of being a journalist here, like I had, maybe written off a little bit and maybe become a little bit frustrated With what I saw as the apathy or the obstinacy of an American Jewish readership. They didn't want to know what Israel was doing in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Now it's not possible to not know, and so there are people who now want to figure out how to, how to deal with that reality. And I'm glad that the that they are interested in having that conversation now,
Maxxe Albert-Deitch
I'm really glad that this conversation is just starting to have more footing in the broader world. I think that it's been the ongoing conversation here at APN is that a year ago, two years ago, this was kind of a fringe issue, and now it's the front page of the front page of The New York Times every single day. That's such a huge shift, Josh, we're coming to the end of our time. I just want to say thank you so much for being here and having this conversation with us, and thank you for the work that you're continuing to do with your book.
Josh Leifer
Thank you so much for hosting me. It was really an honor to speak with you and I really enjoyed this conversation. I, you know, have followed APN's work since I was a child, basically, and I'm very honored that I got the chance to talk with the community. Thank you so much.