Cancelled author caught between activist left and Israel solidarity

(JTA) - Joshua Leifer suspected that his new book about the history of American Jewish identity might challenge some on the pro-Palestinian left, but he never expected to be cancelled. After all, he is himself a high-profile Jewish progressive whose critiques of Israel have appeared in the left-wing publications Jewish Currents, Dissent and Israel’s +972.

If anything, he braced for criticism from the Jewish mainstream, which, as he writes in Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, has been known to quash dissent in the name of a pro-Israel “consensus.”

But when objections from an employee at a Brooklyn bookstore led to the cancellation of an event featuring Leifer — the employee complained that the moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, was a “Zionist,” turning a normative position among American Jews into a disqualifying slur — Leifer’s book became a cause célèbre.

The incident also represented in fractal form many of the themes of the book: A yawning gap between the Zionist Jewish mainstream and young activists who view Israel as a pariah. An inability of some to talk about Israelis and Palestinians without embracing the binaries of good and evil. And, reflected in the autobiographical sections of the book, Leifer’s attempts to reconcile his deep connection to Judaism with his disappointment in a Jewish state that he believes has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme.

“We are caught between parts of an activist left demanding that we disavow our communities, even our families, as an entrance ticket, and a mainstream Jewish institutional world that has long marginalized critics of Israeli policy,” Leifer wrote this week in The Atlantic, about the bookstore cancellation. “Indeed, Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.”

Tablets Shattered is a history of the social and political priorities of American Jews since the early 20th century, and how they shifted to reflect the crises and opportunities of their day. Chief among these shifts is the central role Israel came to play in the Jewish imagination and in communal politics, often eclipsing other homegrown issues and challenges.

Leifer, 30, also writes about how younger Jews no longer accept Israel as an organising principle for their Jewish lives, and are looking for alternatives that feel authentic to their Jewish, liberal selves. And while Leifer aims most of his criticism at the Jewish establishment that kept dissenters at arm’s length, he has harsh words for Jewish progressives, especially since Oct. 7, who are “callous” about the lives of fellow Jews who happen to live in Israel.

Leifer also tells his own story — a New Jersey kid who attended a Solomon Schechter day school through sixth grade; an alumnus of a prestigious Israel program for American high schoolers; a Jewish student activist at Princeton; a member of IfNotNow, a group that calls on American Jewish organizations to end their “support for the occupation”; a writer who reported on anti-government and pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Israel.

Leifer told me he calls himself a “connected critic,” political philosopher Michael Walzer’s term for a dissenter who is deeply attached to the target of his criticism.

“We are part of the community,” Leifer said of Israel critics like him. “We come from the heart of the mainstream Jewish community, and we want to call that community into account for failing to uphold the values it claims to profess explicitly.

"Even in my most strident and foundational critiques of occupation, I always was attached to the idea of a connection and mutual responsibility with Israeli Jews and feeling part of a broader Jewish collectivity. I think it’s wrong to say, 'Well, those Jews over there, we are so disgusted by what they’re doing that we can’t have anything to do with them. And not only can we have nothing to do with them, but that whatever happens to them is probably justified.' That’s a morally reprehensible view, even if I can understand it at a kind of visceral, kishkes level.

"There’s also a contradiction, because Jewish left-wing activism is based around a certain kind of Jewish identity politics. It presupposes a Jewish collectivity, but then it’s a Jewish collectivity that’s limited, basically, to America. That doesn’t make much sense."