A definitive look at the history and future of Jewish identity in America from the tipping point we are currently living in, as the Holocaust moves further back in history and Israel becomes increasingly divisive.
By 2050 more than half the world's Jews will live in Israel. The Jewish people, defined for millennia by diaspora and rootlessness, will be settled. With more than half of the world's Jews currently residing in America, this will mark a historic relocation. So, what of American Jews?
“Like Tablets Shattered” is journalist and scholar Joshua Leifer's report on the state of the history of American Jewry, its fractured present, and a conjecture about its future. Since WWII, the American Jewry has been generally characterized by a striving, assimilationist upward mobility, bourgeois political liberalism, and implicit Zionism. But in the last decade or more, all of the settled upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition have begun to bow. As the binding trauma of Holocaust memory recedes with the passing of the generation that lived through the war; as a chasm grows between younger Jews, distanced by Israeli imperialism, and their parents, raised on the promise of Israeli infallibility; as contemporary society opens itself up to a multiplicity of destigmatized, non-normative forms of self-identification; and as many Jews, like growing numbers of Americans, no longer claim any religious affiliation, the present and future of the American Jewry seems harder and harder to define.
Featuring exclusive conversations with leading advocates and reformers, and those fighting to broaden the conception of what it means to be and to act Jewish in America and the world, this is the definitive book on a turning point in Jewish history. It is also a universal quest to understand the increasingly divisive world we live in.
