A Critique of American Judaism with Joshua Leifer Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hello and welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essentia issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and we’re recording today’s episode live at the Shalom Hartman Institute in New York on February, 25th, 2025.

Daniel Mendelsohn has a wonderful short essay in The New Yorker back in 2012, entitled A Critic’s Manifesto. The essay is a defense of the profession of the critic, a defense of the discipline of the critic as well, and he’s defending it against two criticisms, really. He’s defending against those who look down at the activity of cultural or social criticism as a kind of hobby or side hustle. He said he oftentimes finds himself at cocktail parties being asked, well, what’s your real job? And he’s also defending the position of the critic against the insinuation that the work involved in criticism is tantamount, equivalent to the ubiquitous culture today of Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews.

Mendelsohn insists, contrary to the popular maxim, not everyone is a critic. He says it’s a discipline that when it’s done correctly, it merges deep knowledge of a subject with matters of taste to form meaningful judgment. He writes as follows:

“The serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader. When you write criticism about literature or any other subject, you’re writing for literature or for that subject even more than you’re writing for your reader. You’re adding to the accumulated sum of things that have been said about your subject over the years. If the subject is an interesting one, that’s a worthy project. Because the serious critic loves his subject about anything else, he will review, either negatively or positively, those works of literature or dance or music, high or low, rarified, popular, celebrated or neglected, that he finds worthy of examination, analysis, and interpretation.”

He goes on to say, “To set interesting works before intelligent audiences does honor to the subject. If you only write about what you think people are interested in, you fail your subject and you fail your reader too, who may in the end find himself happy to encounter something he wouldn’t have chosen for himself.”

What I think this means is that those of us who care about something deeply, whatever it is, we depend on critics and on criticism. If we want great literature, or as is the case for our discussion tonight, if we want a great American Jewish community, we need critical examination of its strengths and limitations. We need comparative analysis, maybe to what it was or maybe to what it should be. And we need to arrive at those conclusions in ways or through processes that may make us uncomfortable, so long as the criticism itself does honor to the subject matter.

But as I said earlier, Mendelsohn says that good criticism, meaningful analysis, relies on both subject matter and knowledge, but also taste. The opinion of the critic matters. It’s a key clarification. Critics are going to have strong feelings and emotions that drive their analysis. In other words, in really good criticism, there’s no myth of objectivity. And we shouldn’t long for it. We shouldn’t pretend that that will help us understand something even better. We actually want the passion of the critic in relationship to the material itself.

So I think a lot about criticism as it relates to Judaism and the Jewish community. And most of the conversation about criticism in Jewish life gets hijacked in two different directions. One, by its most strident critics, those who are thriving in this era of Yelp reviews or Twitter rampages and our era of infinite soapboxes. Everyone can be a critic, and those people, I find, tend to fashion themselves after the prophets of ancient Israel. Everything is bad, and the best way to convey that is by yelling at people all the time.

On the other hand, the discipline of real criticism in Jewish life is also savaged by a culture that’s widespread in Jewish institutional life that treats all forms of criticism as disloyalty. An approach that is inherently suspicious that criticism is not just negative, but is about taking down a community as opposed to serving an important function. It’s hard to navigate that line.

I find it the case in my work as well. I identify, perhaps not surprisingly, this is a laugh line for Josh, with Michael Walzer’s model of the connected critic, when Walzer says that the distance of a critic to their own community should be measured in inches, a little bit and off to the side.

I find that the idea of criticism is essential to the work that we do here at the Hartman Institute, where we’re actually not powerful enough to be in charge of much in the Jewish community. We strive to have influence over the powerful. We strive to put ideas out there and sometimes criticism in ways that people who hold actual institutional power can make changes, can adjust, can learn, and where the fact of our independence from the regular Jewish communal infrastructure enables us to engage in ideas and in criticism very differently from those who are entrenched much more deeply in that infrastructure.

But it is a constant and delicate dance for those of us who work at the Institute or who try to do this work. And I find Mendelsohn’s reminder that we are meant to love our subjects more than we are supposed to love or care for our readers or listeners to be a really provocative challenge.

And meanwhile, a lot is changing in Jewish life these days and awfully quickly. My sense has been that, by and large, we’re not witnessing a wholesale remaking of Jewish life in this era of pandemic, war, and Donald Trump, much as an acceleration of trends that have been long in the making. It’s not like the experience of whiplash that many of us feel over the past seven, eight years is just because of these trigger events, as much as the awakening of long simmering trends that are finally seeing their actualization in change and the sense of vulnerability that many of us feel about Jewish life and its stability has been building for decades.

We are ripe for a remaking of Jewish priorities, and for a remaking of the Jewish institutional map, and I, for one, am desperate for that work to take place through deep thinking, even though I’m suspicious that usually it takes place in the Jewish community through reactive thinking, or sometimes, reactionary thinking.

Anyway, these are some of my thoughts as I read through Josh Leifer’s new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. Josh is a journalist, an author, a thinker, and pretty clearly a critic. I think you and I have different dispositions as relates to criticism, maybe different, I don’t want to say red lines, pink lines about our choices, maybe different styles, and I want to unpack all of that with you.

I was thinking throughout the book, not just about its arguments, but about how and whether the kind of criticism advanced in this book, an unsparing critique of the American Jewish community and its priorities, whether this kind of criticism can help the American Jewish community confront its challenges, or whether it can’t. I’m still undecided. I want to talk to you about both the ideas in the book and the approach.

And on that, on the ideas, and the tone, and the question, I’m pretty sure that you and I would agree that the fact that some people insist that in order to express, in order to criticize the Jewish community, or Israel, or anything, you have to go through the performative actions of declaring your love for Israel or for Jewish life to gain the credibility of being able to say something critical.

I think both you and I agree that that rehashing of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Shalom is something that gets played out every single day in Jewish communities across the country is mostly bullshit. It’s avoidance of the actual conversation about the substance of criticism, and it’s not particularly helpful.

But even as you and I sit in different places on this landscape, I’m eager to talk to you about what’s working and not working in Jewish life, about the diagnosis, and also what it will take to get to the prescriptions to lead through change. Thanks for being with us here tonight, and thanks for coming on the show and being here at the Hartman Institute.

Josh: Thanks so much for having me. It’s an honor. I really appreciate it.

Yehuda: Awesome. So let’s jump right in. I want you to summarize for, for me and for our readers, what is the core problem that the American Jewish community face and what do you think, or put it differently, what do you think is the core problem that you’re trying to identify in Jewish communal life, and what do you think got us to that point.

And I know that you wrote 400 pages on this, but it may not be that everyone here has read the book yet, so you’re helping us set the stage by naming the core challenge that you’re addressing and that you’re trying to solve.

Josh: So, I mean, the book, I set out at the outset of writing it, for the book to be mostly descriptive and, and diagnostic. And so I don’t know if it’s useful to say one core challenge because I think the challenges are all interrelated. And the argument, the broad argument that the book makes is that there was such a thing as in a post-war American Jewish consensus, as I understand it, it rested on three pillars, Americanism, Zionism, and Liberalism, and that those three pillars more or less actually worked in the sense that were able to coalesce the majority of American Jewish communities, communal institutions, and people, around a relatively, coherent set of commitments, but that whether you want to time it to Trump’s first election, or, I mean, the book’s genesis was actually in trying to take stock of what had changed since, say, 2015 when the current president first descended the golden escalator, that that consensus had fractured.

And so you could say, well, the problem with American Jewish life is that whereas where there was once a consensus, there no longer is, I’m actually not so sure that that’s a problem and that part of the problem was the way that the consensus was upheld and enforced and not necessarily in a kind of like oppressive authoritarian way, but in, and also in the way that the consensus enabled American Jewish communities to forego asking themselves really hard questions about the challenges of living in the kind of society that America is, which is a very different kind of society than most of the places American Jews have lived over the last millennia.

Yehuda: How do you parse, just as a clarification point, how do you parse the difference between what you characterize as American-ness and Liberalism. Because that’s one of the things I found myself arguing with you, as I was reading the book, which is, I define the version of American liberalism that’s been essential to American Jewish thriving as a kind of American-ness but you’ve identified it as a little bit of a separate pillar. So maybe you could just parse out what those pieces are.

Josh: Yeah, this is one of the most common criticisms of the book’s analytic argument, but I do think they’re distinct and important. And so, by Americanism, I mean basically a certain kind of American Jewish exceptionalism. The belief held by a lot of American Jews and across the denominational range from the reform movement to say, like, the Satmar Rebbe that America is an exceptionally good country and that its exceptional goodness has been in some way confirmed by the Jewish experience in it. So in that way, it’s a kind of political, historical idea.

By Liberalism, I mean, and there, you’re right that there’s a relationship between these things. By liberalism, I mean primarily a liberal approach, approach to religion. And a liberal approach to religion is one that is focused on the individual as the primary unit of religious experience, say, rather than the collective or the community. It’s an approach to religion in which the logic or the entry point into practice is based on choice or volunteerism, rather than, you know, the more traditional concept of mitzvah of obligation. And you know, at its best, it leads to a certain kind of pluralism, but at its worst, it leads to a destabilizing kind of relativism, and creates a situation in which people can’t give reasons for why it’s important to continue to be Jewish.

And I think that, I don’t think I would have been able to articulate that particular problem if I had lumped the Americanism pillar in with the Liberalism pillar, even though they obviously, there is a symbiosis. And there also is a symbiosis between these pillars and Zionism as well. I mean, part of why American Jews were able to make Zionism a central part of their identities has to do with one, the way that like American political society functions. And so that like the charge of dual loyalty, wasn’t something about America, that American Jews had to be like, especially afraid of, especially through the post war era. And it’s, America is like a multicultural, non eth-, there is no ethnos in America, contrary to what some on the, like, the extreme right are trying to say, which is very different than like the kind of European Jewish experience.

Yehuda: So your critique is not as much that this consensus falls apart for American Jews, which could be just a description, and I think is probably true. I think there’s a lot that is at risk in terms of the kind of core default identity of American Jews. We see, we hear this, we hear this in articulations around the limited convening power that American Jewish institutions once had, the difficulty of mobilizing American Jews about shared causes, although there’s a little bit of counter data after the war, which we may come back to.

So your critique is not that the consensus doesn’t hold anymore. It’s actually more robust than that. It’s actually that each of these three pillars, Liberalism, as expressed through American Jewish religion, American-ness, as expressed through a belief in American exceptionalism, Zionism, as expressed in loyalty to the state of Israel, to be something that American Jews needed it to be, that each of those is actually weakening. So as opposed to a framework like, the world stands on three pillars, Torah, Avodah, Gemilut Chassadim, Torah, service of God, and acts of loving kindness, which, you know, stands the test of time a little bit better. Your argument is that each, it’s not just that the consensus disappears, it’s that each of these is breaking down, and as a result, we’re left kind of with a sense of unsure footing.

Josh: Right. And, and this is where the critique comes in and that what was lost or overlooked or foregone or suppressed in order to make each of those pillars actually left us with an impoverished kind of American Judaism. So, you know, like the, I think the place where in the book where this is maybe sharpest is around Israel and Zionism, because my argument in the book, among other arguments about Israel and Zionism, is that, and I, there’s a great Irving Howe quote, the socialist Jewish literary critic, who has this line towards the very end of his book, World of Our Father’s where he says that Israel and Zionism, I’m going to paraphrase this because even after saying it many times, I still don’t get it 100 percent right: Israel and Zionism enabled American Jews to postpone that inner reconsideration of their Jewishness which the American condition required.

And so as long as you could say, all right, I’m gonna donate to the UJA or AIPAC, and I’m gonna feel a closeness to Israel, and that’ll basically be what it, even when you go to shul, like, the Israel bonds are on the pews, so that’s, that’s like what we’re all here for, actually. That created a situation in which once Israel could no longer be the consensus beyond the argument pillar, and also once it could no longer be, and this is what I mean, I don’t mean—I have a very particular definition of Zionism in the book, and I, what I mean by Zionism in the American context, is, one, Israel as the culmination of all of Jewish history, in a kind of providential sense, like the telos of Jewish history, rather than, say, like, a contingent thing that happened, which has significance, spiritual and also communal, but is not the only way that things could have ended up.

And then, I think more germane to the conversation we’re having right now, is that Israel was seen as to be seen as a moral beacon. And in some ways in the embodiment of American Jewish values in miniature. Once that became no longer plausible you were left with communities in which Israel had been the center but couldn’t and couldn’t serve the role it had once filled and what you were left with was basically, not very much.

I mean, I think, this is something a lot, probably a lot of people have experienced, it’s a problem in Jewish education especially. It was certainly a problem in like my own kind of Jewish education coming through the conservative day school system where like fortunately I got a very good Hebrew education which enabled me to go and do other things. But in terms of a robust understanding of Judaism as opposed to Israel, basically nothing.

Yehuda: Let me ask you an absurd question, and I just want you to stay with me on the thought experiment of this.

There’s something about America, in its design, which is inhospitable to what Jews have needed out of their diaspora experiences in terms of cultivating continuity. And I mean that in two ways. One is the kinds of opportunities that America intends to afford in terms of the breakdown of differences, the, like, not having official state religion basically prevents Jews from staying enclaved, right? That’s a great story for Jews who don’t want to live in enclaves, but it’s very bad in terms of cultivating that kind of thick community by necessity that Jewish diaspora environments are in.

And the second is that America has a myth that it is told its people, whoever arrive here, of some version of Go West. Right? Leave your homes, pursue your economic and personal destiny, pursue a story of self actualization. Now, I know that not every American gets that opportunity. It’s harder and harder, I think, to do so. But I wonder whether the failures of American Jewry to sustain thick community of meaning are not because we built weak institutions or because the ideas that held us for a period of time were fundamentally weak, but maybe because America is a kind of steamroller of the kind of particularistic identity that you seem to be longing for back in this book.

Josh: I mean, I think it is, like America, the culture of America has that dissolving kind of quality to it. But I also think that I don’t want to let our forebearers off the hook too much because, in the sense that we know that there were other communities that weren’t represented within the, within this consensus who were on the margins of American Jewish life for a very long time and ended up weathering the storm because they prioritized different things.

Like there, I guess what I mean by that…

Yehuda: Who do you have in mind?

Josh: I have in mind the Haredi communities primarily, but also Orthodoxy more broadly. That I think that, like, was an impossible test and it was a test that many of, I think, many of our forebears probably faced in their own lives of, America does offer the promise of upward mobility, departure from the ghetto, a kind of achievement of universal subjecthood, which American, which Jews had been previously denied. But that also may be, that literally came at the cost of, say, in the case of my great grandfather who I mentioned in the book, going to work at the garment factory on Shabbat. I don’t begrudge him for the choice, and this way there’s like a maybe tragic element to the story here. Because if he hadn’t made that choice, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be here having this conversation, but he did make a, he did make a choice. And it was one that also others didn’t make.

So I think it’s possible to judge him charitably in the context of his own time and still diagnose a structure of priorities that was adopted pretty widespread by most American Jews that led to a certain kind of communal formation.

Yehuda: So this becomes a kind of thread in the book, and it certainly becomes essential to the end of your book, where you describe a version of a different kind of modern Jewishness, a retrieval of traditional observance, Jewish practice, which is a story I know that you’ve undergone in your own life, and you have, I find, a more appreciative approach towards observing communities and even in your narrative of like, Orthodoxy managed to resist these other things than other denominations.

I found that interesting for a historical reason, one of which is I understand the choices made by contemporary Orthodoxy and even the rise of ultra-Orthodoxy, not as they were more resilient through the 20th century and holding on to their ways, but very much as like a post-Holocaust countercultural move, intentionally countercultural move, to say, yeah, we notice what’s being lost by liberal Jews, and we’re gonna push against it, but also that it, in, it, it’s an equally transactive relationship to America. Like, they’re doing the same kind of assimilation work, just maybe not in how they keep Shabbat, but certainly in relationship to economic patterns, voting patterns, social politics, and so forth.

So, I’m curious, what is it that’s drawing you to that story of Orthodoxy as something that, I felt you had the most appreciation for, ultimately, in this book, which was surprising.

Josh: Well I think that it’s obviously historically true that there is essentially no meaningful Orthodox in America, certainly no significant Haredi communities in America. But the critique of Liberalism within Orthodoxy was something that was put forth in, on the European continent before, and so I don’t think that there’s a contradiction here.

In other words, like, the observing of the problem of, like the crisis of Jewish modernity, if you want to call it that, that is old, actually. It gets recapitulated in America for the first time after the Holocaust, but it, these are ways of thinking that, you know, could date all the way back to Samson Raphael Hirsch, and in some ways, it just took a long time for that to reach the American shores.

I think that I hear a lot the argument that, well, you see there are affluent Orthodox communities, and there certainly are, and there’s strategic voting, and there certainly is, and this is evidence of assimilation. I’m not convinced that that’s a meaningful way to use the word assimilation, in the sense that if you were to ask people in those communities, they would have no problem drawing the line between the culture of Jewish community and the culture of American society. They would say, this is what we do, and that’s what they do.

I think most non-Orthodox or non-liberal American Jews, and we can talk about like the problem of Modern Orthodoxy in this bifurcated map because it’s something that people have raised in other conversations, but that’s not something that most American Jews are able to do, and I think that it’s something that we don’t have to copy, because we’re not, I’m not, like the book is not a call for everyone to become Haredi.

But it is an observation of a different way of relating to the culture we find ourselves in, which does have this dissolving quality. And it’s also a values question. We all have critiques of different, of different kinds of communities, and there’s certainly a lot of critique of Haredi and Orthodox communities in, in the book. But I guess in some ways by valorizing in a way that I think is almost never done in mainstream American writing, by valorizing some of the things that I think Orthodox and Haredi communities do well, I wanted to kind of provoke non-Orthodox and Liberal communities to say, well, well, is it true that the values of American society should be the values that we practice in our Jewish communities?

I think that I have a different view of them. I have a less triumphal understanding of America, and so I’m much more worried about what it means that Jews can’t draw a line between their Americanism and their Judaism.

Yehuda: I guess one of the things that I struggled with through this was, look at, not in such, I’m going to describe it as more severe than it is in the book, but it’s pretty severe in the book. And it’s kind of exemplified by you using the phrase even earlier in this conversation, “I don’t want to let my forebears off the hook.” And I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s, that’s what you don’t want to do. I mean, you go after Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Once you’re doing that, I mean, it’s just, everyone is…

Josh: Which was intentional.

Yehuda: It feels like, well, then everyone’s fair play. There’s a different way to look at the struggles of Reform and Conservative Jews in America today as, and there are, it’s different, it’s more severe institutionally in the Conservative movement where 40 percent of Conservative synagogues have closed over the past 30 years. There’s a major institutional contraction.

But there are a great deal of sincere Reform and Conservative Jews, who, if you looked at their institutions from the perspective of, like, mass institutional analysis, you would see a whole set of problems, but who are going to weekday minyan, and who are living Jewish lives, and actually feel that they are doing exactly the calculus that you see working better in Orthodoxy, but they would say, it’s actually working better in my Reform and Conservative Synagogue than Orthodoxy because I’m actually honoring the positive commitments of Liberalism in ways that Orthodoxy is foregoing.

So I, I guess I’m, I’m just curious, it goes back to that point about, a critic’s orientation is also rooted in a matter of taste. And there was something very transient about the criticism of what’s there. And I would, I would love for you to unpack that a little bit about getting in behind your own instinct to see the story a particular way.

Josh: Yeah, no, I, I was, when you brought up the Mendelsohn quote and, and thinking of taste, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the sense of, well, what is it about a certain strand of liberal congregation that doesn’t do it for me personally now, because I’m a critic, I think that it doesn’t do it for Judaism objectively. But, and it might just be a matter of taste, but I don’t think, I don’t think it’s only a matter of taste. And I think that that has to do with a certain kind of traditionalist commitment that I have.

And I think what I find problematic, to use that word, in some of these communities, even if, in some, like, like I wrote in the book, there are virtues, like the regular Reform minyan attender. He is a minority in his denomination, but, and that’s a virtue, that’s like, that’s a virtue regardless of what community he’s doing that, because it reflects communal commitment, and discipline, and obligation.

But to go back to what I was saying, I think that, so, if I have a, a traditionalist aesthetic preference, or, I, I think that’s, it’s not just, it’s not just arbitrary, I think that, I think it’s the more honest and coherent one and that there is something, I think challenged me, surveying the American Jewish landscape, was that, whether at the level of liturgy or self-justification, some of the liberal streams and places I went to really struggled to explain why they were doing what they were doing, other than it feels good, I like this, I like that better.

And I wanted to write a defense of what I thought at the time was a kind of mini-renaissance of progressive Jewish startup initiatives, and I kept running into this problem, which was that people were not so, you know, I’ll have to forgive the, I hope the interview, people I interview in the book, forgive me for this, but the people I spoke to were not entirely, but many of them were not very good at explaining what they were trying to do, and why they were doing the things that they were doing, and why it made sense to do things that they were doing, other than a kind of, what I thought a very kind of superficial set of, not even reasons, but preferences.

And there are also traditionalists who don’t have good reasons for doing what they’re doing too. But, again, the audience of the book, at least as I imagined it initially, wasn’t going to be primarily people who are already living extremely committed, like, totally halakhic lives. I mean, it happens to be the case that the book is now being sold at Eichler’s, which is not something that I ever expected.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, if you get on Dovid Bashevkin’s podcast, that probably paves the way.

Josh: Yeah, and I, and that’s been an interesting part of the book rollout too. I think what I wanted to do, again, in the role of a critic is challenge the people in the liberal, non-Orthodox world to say, like, can we think better about what we’re doing?

Can we give better reasons for why we’re doing things other than, like, we, this is a real example, we rolled out, like, we wanted to have a musical Shabbat, we rolled out maracas to have everyone shake, and the kids liked it. I don’t think that that’s a very good reason for doing that practice. So in some sense I wanted to challenge that approach to thinking about observance.

Yehuda: I guess it goes back to that tension between—do we love our subjects or do we love our readers? And that felt to me very acute around that particular issue, cause, I will say honestly it’s one of the things that changed, has changed for me over the last fifteen years since I came to Hartman, which was, you know, I felt earlier in my career that huge gap between what I thought Judaism should be and who the Jewish people were.

And it felt like, I don’t know, that gap was so big that it felt like a fixation with the aspiration of what Judaism is supposed to be would be a means of lifting something up. And then something about being with Jews made me start to appreciate the Ehrlicher Yid in a different way, just like the Jew who is doing a Judaism that kind of sucks, but they like it, and they’re not, they’re not aspiring for a groundbreaking Judaism. They’re aspiring for a Judaism that’s gonna help organize their life, and make sense to them, and be coherent.

And I, I’m genuinely curious for you as a critic who says in the book multiple times, especially in your first concluding chapter, followed by your second concluding chapter, which we’ll talk about, the only way we come out of this is by, I’m not going to quote it, but you say, like, I’m here to be part of this.

And I’m curious how we bridge that gap between the version of a Judaism that you wish would have the thickness and richness and seriousness that would drive us and the basic ways that human beings are, who are never quite what God wants of us in the wilderness, and God has to learn that message, and we’re never quite what the prophets want the people to be, and the prophets learn that message because nobody listens to them. Like, how do you think about that as a critic?

Josh: Yeah, there’s a, I, again, will paraphrase, there’s a line from the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, “Can’t we dissolve the people and elect another?” Maybe if people are feeling that today as well, and it’s a perennial challenge, I think, for the critic, I mean, I would say, it’s true that there’s stringent criticism of certain ways of being Jewish in the book. And especially of the way that that, those forms of Jewish practice have been institutionalized, but at the same time, I think, I would hope that it, the book also conveys an appreciation for, at the same time, all the people I just criticized who were doing lots of weird things, and still doing it.

I mean, something, I gave a talk at a university in Israel fairly recently and they asked, this was a kind of very old sociologist, who wanted to, you know, this is not a unique Jewish story, what about Irish and Italian Catholics, and I said, you know, the kind of amazing thing is that if you, if you actually do only look at American Jews through the lens of kind of, immigration history, it’s amazing that people are still Jews, considering where, like, Italian, Polish, Irish, Catholic, like, ritual practice is in contemporary life, and most American Jews are descendants of people who arrived in America at the same time, so that actually attests to a certain kind of living spark in the Jewish people that is still alive. And maybe if I were writing that book now, I would have alluded to that feature a little bit more clearly.

Yehuda: I mean, we’re in a building which is a proof of this. This building was built in 1951 or 1952, you can see downstairs, by the mainline Protestant churches and they built it as a headquarters for the churches in America. The Jews have moved in, and Ross Douthat writes about it in Bad Religion, writes about this building as a case and if you compare how we’re doing relative to mainline Protestantism on a lot of trends, we’re mirrored.

But actually, the discourse around innovation that actually is widespread, not just in the quote unquote innovation sector, but actually across the Jewish communal landscape is much more robust than it is in other sectors as well.

You know, every one of these stories, any version of an imagined future relies on some version of imagined past. And the imagined past that anchors your story is about the radical politics of your American Jewish ancestors. Like that, and you have a, maybe I’m getting it wrong, but it felt as though you felt that you kind of indicate the, the turning, the negative turning point is when Lower East Side Garment District Jews start to move up the economic ladder and shift from radical politics, which are like the good version of liberal commitments, into the bourgeois politics of meritocracy and the middle class, a kind of abandonment that’s there.

First of all, is that a good characterization? I kind of heard it that way. You long for those people. That’s when you get to take the ding at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Josh: Well, I feel like, I feel like I tried to give an engaging but also non nostalgic approach to this. I mean, there’s even a line, again, taken from, I think from Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, which is like, no one wanted their kid to stay, like, no Jewish first or second gen-immigrant who worked in a factory said, I want my kid to work in the factory too. There was nothing glorious about living in the muck of, say, Rivington Street. That’s how I was thinking through it.

Obviously, there is an element of romance too. Not actually so much about the radicalism per se, although obviously, like, I have my own kind of political commitments, but actually because of the way that the culture of secular, of the, like, secular Yiddish culture enabled what I would say, like, maybe in academic terms, a Jewish national life that was, I guess, like, immersive and authentic, engaged with modernity, but inexorably Jewish.

And that what gets lost in the move to the suburbs is this way of life, is a kind, is a culture, is a language too, and I do, I mourn that because I think that we’re worse off as Jews for having become disconnected in such a dramatic way from our own pasts that we can’t, we don’t have access to the texts that our own grandparents would have read. And, again, as someone with a traditionalist, aesthetic and political preference, like, I think that’s bad.

So in that sense, there is, but I tried not to do a kind of, like, not to do the form of idealization of the Lower East Side Jewish radical life that I think you find on certain parts of the American, the young American Jewish left today and kind of Bundist nostalgia, although the Bund wasn’t even really actually a thing in America to the real extent, but in some imagined sense that, but most charitably what those people are longing for is this, I mean, they have a particular problem, which is that they are longing also for an authentic, immersive, particularist way of being Jewish in modernity that they don’t have recourse to Zionism for, but they also don’t have recourse to religion. And so they have to find it in a kind of, this form of historical reclamation.

Yehuda: Yeah, I think authentic is the right word. That’s a very, it’s a, it’s a common and really slippery word that only means something in the mind of the person that’s using it to describe something that they are longing for or that they think other people are appealing for. And what one person’s authenticity is totally mysterious to others, right? Then your cocktail by the end of the book of a desire to hold on to your left politics and your traditional observance is a grasp at that, which I would say as a person who is more probably similar cultural observance, but different from you politically on certain issues, feels really authentic to me.

And that’s where it’s like hard, and, and I don’t have any nostalgia at all for leftist politics of the Lower East Side, because it just wasn’t a feature of my family’s home. I think they, my family’s story, I think they left, they had no nostalgia for that story. Maybe for the pickles, but not for any other part of it.

Josh: I think that I would, I know I just used the word authentic, but I think that what I think a better way of getting at the thing that I’m trying to describe is reflexive, or something that’s second nature, or even first nature. That what we lost with the disappearance of secular Yiddish culture was just a non-effortful way of being Jewish in modernity, because what ended up happening for American Jews was that all of a sudden it took a lot of effort.

So the argument that I’m trying to make in the book is like, that’s okay, actually, and we shouldn’t, and actually, we should embrace the effort. And that’s where observance comes in, because it’s a claiming of the kind of responsibility to say, the only way we’re going to have meaningful Jewish lives is by trying and working really hard at it. And that’s also where the critique, by virtue of that commitment, I also come to the critique of the forms of, generally speaking, liberal observance and liberal Judaism that I think are not trying very hard, that are looking for easy syntheses or easy answers. I think there are kinds of cop-outs to the challenge that, like, not necessarily only the American Jewish condition, but that the modern Jewish condition demands of us.

Yehuda: So I’m going to take us on a little bit of a different track and I’m going to go back to Daniel Mendelsohn and that article in the New Yorker, which I liked so much. He writes that: “Any call to eliminate negative reviewing is to infringe catastrophically on the larger project of criticism. If a critic takes seriously his obligation to pass judgment,” right, which has to be negative as well as positive, “his sense of responsibility to those judgments and their significance has to outweigh all other considerations. He concludes by saying, people who want to go to lots of parties without provoking awkward encounters should be caterers, not critics.”

So I want to ask this, and I’m going to make this a personal question because you made it personal in the book. Had this book been written and released prior to October 7th, you would have agitated people only in one direction. Right? Folks, especially, basically, establishment Jews, who are more or less the majority. Post October 7th, you endured quite a bit of drama on social media and elsewhere by taking a position that put you at odds with what you candidly criticize in the additional post-October 7th chapter about what you describe as a test that the Jewish left was going to encounter about whether it was capable of expressing actual sympathy to dead Israelis after October 7th, without couching that in some language of the justification of their death because of the occupation, and you say they failed miserably.

You were out front on this right after October 7th. You were openly critical of Jewish publications and their, and their moral failures in this moment. You got kind of kicked out of that team. Maybe you got welcomed back eventually. I don’t know. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about re-ending the book. You added a chapter at the end of what’s changed after October 7th, in which you try to do a very delicate dance. Section 1 is the failure of the left after October 7th. Section 2 is the failure of the establishment to take seriously the destruction of Gaza. That makes it uncomfortable at both parties, right?

And since I know you’re not going to be a caterer, I’d love for you to talk through, I mean maybe you will, but I’d love for you to talk through the decision to add that piece, and what you think it did to change, if anything, the overall project of the book.

Josh: It’s a big question. Yeah, I’m not getting invited to a lot of parties these days.

Yehuda: You did get invited to Hartman.

Josh: But I’m here!

I completed the manuscript of the book, essentially the weekend, the week before October 7th. I had sent it out and my first reaction when, because, you know, and in some ways we are still in the eternal present of post-October 7th and at a certain point I had to end my experience of it in order to write about it, but at first my reaction was, let’s just slap an editor’s note on this. It was written before. I was dealing with some health problems at the time. I was like, I can’t fix this, basically. And we’ll deal with the consequences.

I was lucky that my wife Shaindy, who’s here, and my editor and my agent all said, no. You have a huge opportunity to really make a statement here, in line with my reaction and the divergence of my reaction from people I had been in political community with before. And I actually didn’t just add the last chapter, but I rewrote something close to 20,000 words of the book.

For those who have read the book, the chapter that begins with Aleph Bet Yehoshua was actually not initially in the book. And I think I went through a certain process of cheshbon nefesh after October 7th in terms of thinking about, how did I end up in a place, in a political community where I found myself so at odds with the instinctive reaction of those around me?

At the same time, the book is stridently critical of the American Jewish establishment. I wasn’t going to go rush into the arms of those organizations either. I think that, and yeah, and I think that they have also failed. They have failed. Because I’m speaking here to a mainly, I assume, an American Jewish audience, I’ll couch it in very particular terms. But I think they failed even in the most basic level of representing their constituents. Like, there’s the moral failure of seeing the destruction of Gaza and, and the violence that Israeli forces brought there and not having anything to say about it, which is a moral failure of its own.

But then there’s also the failure of, and I think this is borne out, that a lot of American Jews, while at the same time experiencing the antisemitism and the fear and this new sense of vulnerability that they hadn’t felt before, me included, also probably admitted to themselves behind closed doors that they were ashamed of the way Israel was acting. And that view basically found no public representation. It still basically finds no public representation in American Jewish life.

And so I felt, you know, I had, as a critic, I had a responsibility to observe the moral failures of both these two tendencies, and both of which, if I’m being honest, I have one foot in, in the sense of, I have spent a lot of my adult life on the kind of political left, but I was raised in the American Jewish institutions, and it’s the social milieu that I am, like, genetically related to, and so I’m not just criticizing people I don’t have a connection to, I’m, dafka criticizing them because I have a connection to them.

Yehuda: I guess I just have a different observational hypothesis about what’s happened in the American Jewish community since October 7th, which is not a recognition of, well, yes, the left failed in some really, really dramatic ways around allyship, public support for, basically public support for Hamas, gaslighting of Israel’s international community, failure of the human rights organization, all of that.

And it’s not accompanied for the mainstream American Jews by shame about how American Jews did or didn’t respond, or even shame about the conduct of the war, but a lot of moral confusion about how to hold those two things together, which is very different than a sense that both of these sides has failed. And I’m wondering, I actually am genuinely wondering whether we are seeing, on some fronts, some of what you’re describing has to be right. These are longer-term trends that have been percolating for a long time around American Jewish ambivalences.

But I see, like, weirdly, a kind of renaissance of the possibility of a kind of, and maybe it’s just me being an optimist, of a kind of people finding their footing in a way that hasn’t been the case before. We, in the Jewish community, communal organizations, what’s described as “the surge,” of a re-attachment to Jewish life is still visible in the workforce in very significant ways. People who are shifting their careers to work for the Jewish community. I don’t know, maybe, it may be that there are, is a certain kind of reversal of some of the exact trends that you decried in most of this book, that is going to put us in a very weird place going forward.

Josh: My encounter with the Jew on the street has been different and has been one of, I think, accelerated disaffiliation and that there are, my sense is that there were people who maybe could have been brought in or made adjacent to mainstream Jewish life, but who feel like there’s not a place for them.

But I also think that even if it were the case that somehow this pillar, so to speak, of the consensus is reanimated by a rally around the flag effect or a sense of embattlement, I as a critic still think it’s inadequate because it’s also, it’s failing this other moral test. And what I mean by that is that if what happened on October 7th was that the left could not recognize Jewish Israeli humanity, and recognize that Israeli Jews have a right to self determination, and to live in safety and security, it remains the case that a large segment of Jewish institutional life, in deed or rhetoric or in both, does the same to Palestinians.

And so my critique would be like, well, I, it’s a shame that what’s learned from this experience is a doubling down on the very kinds of commitments that have led us to this extremely zero-sum way of thinking in the first place, I would hope.

And I think this is where, what gives me, actually gives me a sense of optimism. One is that, it’s true, is the reception of the book, in the sense that it’s, it’s true, like you said, that it probably would have only pissed off people who are more in the establishment world and now it also pissed off some people on the radical left, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the places that have the synagogues, the community centers, the institutions, that in some sense want or do represent the American Jewish consensus or what remains of it would be open to hearing my view and they are, in a way that I didn’t expect.

And I think that, if there is any optimism, it’s like, not very long ago, an organization like JStreet was not a place where the word occupation could be used. Things have progressed beyond that way. Not as fast as I would have liked. Not in the same, not, not nearly in the way that I would have hoped. But I actually think, I encounter people in the most surprising places, say, you know, davening at a very normal Modern Orthodox shul where all of a sudden people are involved, connected to things like Hasmol Haemuni, the religious left in Israel.

Now maybe that’s, I’m self selecting because those are the people I’m finding myself around, but I don’t think that’s…

Yehuda: It’s like, who are you, what are you reading in Shul? I’m going to come sit next to you.

Josh: Right, and that might be the case, but I think that, I hope that, and maybe this is just, I hope, because it is the only way that things will actually be better for people living on the ground there, is that, in the wake of October 7th, people aren’t doubling down on the same things they believed, but are actually recognizing the need for the situation to change.

Yehuda: Please join me in thanking Josh Leifer for tonight.

Josh: Thanks so much.