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.”