Joshua Leifer > Quotes

“The reactions of some on the left to the October 7, 2023, attack revealed with disturbing clarity the extent to which antisemitic thinking had found a home in my own political camp, even among erstwhile allies. Cheers for Hamas gunmen, glee at the killing of Israeli civilians, grotesque conspiracies of Jewish global control—all have appeared at pro-Palestine demonstrations. And to ignore this reality, as some prefer, is to do a disservice to the movement that is rightfully outraged over Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Acknowledging the reality of antisemitism on the left is, in fact, wholly compatible with opposing Israeli war crimes.

Antisemitism on the left takes a different form than on the right, but it is no less real. Right-wing antisemitism imagines Jews as a threat to the authentic members of the organic nation; it figures Jews as a foreign, malign influence, usurping and corrupting the Volk. Contemporary left-wing antisemitism, by contrast, envisions Jews as the quintessential oppressors— the puppet masters and chief beneficiaries of capitalism, imperialism, and even white supremacy.”
― Joshua Leifer, Like Tablets Shattered

“A series of questions has motivated the writing of this book. Is it possible to live a life defined by Judaism and, at the same time, guided by progressive values? How does one maintain one’s Jewishness while grappling with the gruesome reality in Israel/Palestine? What does it take to sustain community in an era of disintegration and flux, at the start of a new cycle of large-scale geopolitical turbulence and war? I do not have all the answers. Far from it. But it is my hope that I have, here, provided a starting point to begin to formulate them.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

“As they saw it, Bułak-Bałachowicz’s forces sought to put the Jews back in their place. The plan, the general announced, was “to murder the Jews, to take their property, and to erase them from the earth.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

“In the fall of 1944, the journalist Maurice Hindus was among the first Americans embedded with the Red Army to enter the eastern European cities and towns reoccupied after Nazi Germany’s retreat.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

“In the American Jewish collective consciousness, the Holocaust has functioned as the historical glue of the postwar synthesis. The Holocaust illuminated America’s exceptional goodness by contrast to European barbarism and by virtue of America’s defeat of the Nazis. It confirmed the absolute necessity of Israel as existential insurance policy. It reinforced the necessity of the open, liberal society for Jewish flourishing. Holocaust memory concretized a shared sense of victimhood, a sensitivity to the historically precarious nature of Jewish survival, and a filial duty that, for many American Jews, is often the primary reason they give for their continued Jewish identification. But this is a role the Holocaust can fulfill for only so long. While creative opportunists continue feverishly to mine the event for content, this is just another indication that the Holocaust is leaving the realm of present memory, transforming, like the Spanish Inquisition, into a matter of the distant Jewish past.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

“Settlement preached, that even if life in Europe was one of arduous survival and certain suffering, America guaranteed spiritual death.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

“one-third of eastern European Jews left their homes behind, primarily for United States, the goldene medine (golden land). It was, wrote Irving Howe, “a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life