Josh Leifer: Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the question perhaps more urgent than ever is, what will the future of American Jewish life look like?

Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (Dutton 2024) won a National Jewish Book Award in 2025. His essays and reporting have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Statesman and elsewhere. He is a PhD candidate at Yale University, where he studies the history of modern moral and social thought.

Brought to Temple Israel by the generosity of the Rose Feinberg Lecture Fund.

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