The Chickens Come Home to Roost for Joshua Leiffer:

An Open-Letter from a Zionist Writer to an Antizionist, Offering Some Free Advice

(Context: Joshua Leiffer, an antizionist writer and journalist and co-founder of If Not Now, was supposed to have a book talk at powerHouse books in Brooklyn, but was rejected when it became known that the moderator of the talk was a Zionist, and, according to him, “they would not permit Zionists on the premises.) 

Dear Joshua Leiffer, 

I am sorry that your book debut for Tablets Shattered was canceled this week due to antizionist censorship. 

Although you are an avowed antizionist who has made a career of distancing yourself from despicable Zionists like me, you were still turned away from the mainstream literary world like the rest of us. 

And, for that, I am sorry.

I certainly know how it feels – some of us have been dealing with the censorship of antizionism for years. 

As a Zionist poet, I have been told, to my face, that Zionist work was not welcome, and that these publications would never consider my work, given my support for Israel. 

They were not, however, antisemitic. 

At least, that is what they told me. 

They could not be antisemitic, they said, because they read work by people like you, “real Jews,” they would say, whose “Jewish values compel them to be on the right side of history by denouncing Israel.” 

While Jews like me, who support the State of Israel, are bad Jews, and, therefore, can be discriminated against.

After all, we are not even real Jews, not like Joshua Leiffer. 

The literary world has made it an explicit policy to silence Zionist voices. 

And Jewish antizionists like you have stood idly by while writers like me have been silenced. 

So while I am sorry that you have had to go through this, I cannot help but feel a small satisfaction that there is a kind of poetic justice in this. 

You may not have realized it, you may still not realize it, and you may never realize it, but your entire career is built upon my back and the backs of people like me. 

The mainstream Jews who disagree with you. 

You and I grew up together, in the same conservative Jewish world, attending the same Jewish events, going to the same Jewish camps, and learning the same material about Israel. 

And yet here we stand, 10,000 miles away from one another. 

It is true – we were taught some Israeli propaganda growing up. We were told a one-sided narrative that overemphasized Israel’s glory and underemphasized Israel’s failures. It is true. 

You have made a career out of exposing those flaws to the world. 

However, in so doing, you have cast an entire world of Jewry under the bus. 

The vast majority of Jews support the State of Israel and most Jews identify as Zionists.  

In fact, antizionism is almost entirely concentrated in liberal, elite, reform, Jewish circles. 

Antizionism is a luxury good, one that most Jews cannot afford. 

However, for people like you, it has been the gift that keeps on giving.  

You have had quite a successful career, more successful than one I could ever dream of having myself. 

You have been published in prestigious magazines and newspapers, publications far too prestigious to risk tarnishing their reputation by publishing the work of a Zionist author.

The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Nation… 

These are all major publications. Getting published in one is a major accomplishment, and you have been published in all of them.  

So I hope you will forgive my jealousy – these are publications that would never stoop so low as to consider publishing the work of a proud Zionist like me, and that is a point of personal pain for my ego. 

Maybe before this event, you would have disputed that claim. You might have said that there are other reasons they would not consider my work. I have certainly had the quality of my work insulted before.   

But, if Joshua Leiffer, one of the leaders of Jewish antizionism, cannot hold a book talk in Brooklyn, the heartland of Jewish antizionism, imagine how hard it is for someone like me.

If you cannot talk about your book, which is definitive in its antizionism, imagine how hard it is to publish a collection of poetry about the hostages when most newspapers of the world pretend they do not even exist. 

You have made a career for yourself as an antizionist Jew, someone who parades their Judaism around before cheering crowds of antisemites and says, “look friends! I am with you! I am here, so you cannot be antisemitic, no matter what those evil Zionists might say!” 

And I was that evil Zionist. 

I was that evil Zionist who has spent the past ten years of my life dealing with the damage that people like you have created. 

How many Jews have thrown under the bus to make it to where you are today? 

How many times did you hear someone say something disparaging about a Jewish person while you stood silently by? 

How many times have you seen other Jewish artists get censored for their work when you said nothing? 

Every time you enable an antizionist, another Jew suffers. 

When you tell someone that antizionism is not antisemitic, you teach them that discriminating against Zionists is OK.  

And how many people have you said that too? How many people did they go and say that too? How many Jews have been discriminated against as a direct result of your work? 

Jews have been getting discriminated against by the media all year, and yet you were silent then. 

(Earlier this year, Gabrielle Zevin had a similar experience with a Chicago bookstore that cancelled a reading of hers after discovering she had once attended a Hadassah event)

It is hard to have sympathy for someone who has so negatively impacted my life, but I do. 

I am sorry that this happened. 

I am sorry for you because, as much as you have distanced yourself from people like me, I would rather have you draw close than to drift further. 

We are, at the end of the day, Jews. 

If this experience teaches you anything, I hope it teaches you that. 

They would gladly burn us together in their gas chambers, so we might as well learn to enjoy each other’s company in the meantime. 

You have just as much of a right to the life you want to live as I do, and I do only hope for the best for you. 

But, as it stands currently, I am deeply worried about you.  

As someone steeped in history, I am much more concerned about the fate of people like you than of people like me. 

The Jewish people has always survived – if there is one guarantee in history, it is that. 

But the Jews who abandon their people never do. 

And you have certainly abandoned us.  

Antizionist Jews have convinced themselves that, if they bend themselves into the right kind of pretzel, the antisemites will not hurt them. 

Like the Enlightened Jews of Germany, who thought davening on Sunday and crossing themselves made them more German than Jewish, or the Conversos of Spain, your new clothes will not save you. 

Apostasy is a perennial problem in Judaism – for the apostates, not the Jews. 

Every apostate movement dies within a few generations. The descendants of the founders either return to traditional Judaism or they intermarry and their children cease to be Jewish. 

And I do hope that will not be your fate, but that decision is entirely in your hands.   

The sad truth is that you and your movement have won.

You have successfully outflanked the mainstream Jewish community and have positioned yourselves as the future of Jewish America in the eyes of the liberal elite.

Afterall, that is what your book, Tablets Shattered, is about… the end of a century of American Jewish life and the rise of a new one. 

One which, I can only assume, you plan to lead.   

That out of the shattered Tablets of American Jewish life, Judaism will be born anew. 

B'hatzlacha, by the way. 

But antizionism will end like every other apostate movement – in the gas chambers, as this experience may be teaching you. 

So please, let this experience open your eyes, come back into the fold, before it is too late. 

~

Since the title of your book is an obvious homage to our holy Torah, written by Moses, a great Zionist, I would like to end with a religious thought.

The title of your book is Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life.

This title implies that the “Tablets” have been shattered recently, that the “Tablets” are the American Jewish century, and the end of that century is the shattering, and that this experience of brokenness is new to us. 

But the Tablets have been shattered for 3500 years – the brokenness of the Jewish experience is nothing new. 

Yet even though the Tablets were shattered, we never abandoned them. 

Just because we and the world we live in is broken does not mean we abandon our sacred Tablets all together. 

The sacred Tablets have been shattered for centuries – what makes us Jewish is our commitment to carrying the beauty of that brokenness wherever we go. 

From shtetl to shtetl, from nation to nation, from exile to Israel, we carry that brokenness with us. 

When the Shah fell in 1979, 2500 unbroken years of Jewish life in Persia came to an end, and hundreds of thousands of Persian Jews were scattered around the world for the first time in millenia. 

Now their children sit in my classroom and laugh with their Ashekenazi and Sephardic friends about the funny nuances between their different traditions. 

Brokenness is part of Judaism – finding beauty in that brokenness and passing it on to our children is what makes us Jewish. 

Our responsibility is to carry the Shattered Tablets with us wherever we go, hoping that one day we may unburden ourselves of this brokenness in the Land of Israel, so that we may once again be made whole. 

But if not, we will carry that broken weight for all of the days of our lives, and we will pass it on to our children, the way our parents passed it on to us, from the beginning of time, to the end of eternity.  

I do not dispute that American Jewish life is changing, and I do not disagree that there has been a major rift in our Jewish community. 

But that rift was caused by people like you taking advantage of your unique status as Jews to curry favor in non-Jewish progressive circles. 

And now the chickens have come home to roost. 

You have made a career out of throwing your fellow Jews under the bus, and now you find yourself in that very same position.  

Luckily, the G-d of Israel is extremely forgiving.

If you choose to do Teshuvah, repentance, and rejoin the ranks of your people, you will be welcomed back. 

Despite all the damage you have done, it would still be better for you to come back than for you to suffer more.  

But if you do not do this Teshuvah, do not be surprised when you find yourself facing the same antisemitic firing squad you trained to shoot your Zionist countrymen.