For Political Theology Network, I wrote a review of Joshua Leifer’s new book Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life— and a personal reflection on my own American Jewish religious journey.
“The grass seemed greener in Orthodoxy, I’ve realized, because my yearning for authenticity and escape reflected a structural lack embedded in late capitalist dystopia… Today, it seems to me more honest to learn to live with this lack, than to imagine that any faith, flag or folkway can fully fill it.
Tablets Shattered tracks Leifer’s own decade of wrestling, as a young leftist millennial like myself, with the religious and political contradictions of American Jewish life, and since its release it has generated spirited, often heated debate about Zionism and anti-Zionism, Jewish religiosity, the Jewish Left and more…
Tablets Shattered offers plenty of incisive observations and challenging provocations on a range of topics, often from a place of progressive commitment. But by embracing traditionalism as a “radical” counter to modernity while signaling disenchantment with the political Left, Tablets Shattered is naively utopian at best, while at worst, it channels a reactionary zeitgeist in our dangerous era of ‘diagonalist’ politics…
The neo-traditionalists have only re-enchanted the world in various ways; the point, however, remains to change it…
Taken together, Tablets Shattered’s neo-traditionalism, ‘Zionist realism’, anti-Left polemic and dismissal of the religious life of the bulk of American Jewry are cut from the same conservative cloth. Rather than a novel rearticulation of Left politics, they signal a rearguard retreat from its emancipatory horizon.”
Read more at Political Theology Network.
Ben Lorber 
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