Instead of piling on Joshua Leifer, listen to him
The pro-Israel crowd that delighted in Leifer’s cancellation played to Internet outrage, not the facts
When author Joshua Leifer’s book launch event with Andy Bachman was cancelled, pro-Israel Internet commentators piled on. Photo-illustration by Nora Berman; Joni Kletter; Penguin Random House Books; X
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman August 26, 2024
The shopworn journalists’ adage that if you’re upsetting everybody, you must be doing something right applies, in spades, to journalist and author Joshua Leifer.
A Brooklyn bookstore employee canceled his launch event last week for his new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, because he was to appear alongside a Zionist rabbi. The decision prompted a deluge of serves-you-rights, I-told-you-sos and jokes-on-yous from Leifer’s fellow Jews who object to his criticisms of Israel.
The employee of Powerhouse Arena bookstore took issue with the fact the Leifer was set to appear with his friend, Rabbi Andy Bachman, who has made comments defending Israel.
“We don’t want a Zionist on our stage,” the employee told Leifer.
If you thought Jews of all political stripes would unite and rush to Leifer’s defense against a clear act of discrimination, you’ve never been online. We Jews have become as indentured to the internet’s ruling outrage algorithms as everyone else. Perhaps there was a time when a Jewish opponent of Leifer’s point of view would have posted, “Don’t agree with him, but let the guy speak.”
Nope. The overwhelming reaction of the pro-Israel crowd was to take the knife from the hands of a feckless bookstore employee and say, “Thanks, I’ll twist it from here.”
Judging by the childish salvos Leifer’s critics launched at him following the L’affaire Powerhouse, they likely won’t bother to read what he has to say. But the people who want to shout Leifer down, on the pro- or anti-Israel side, are the ones who need to listen up. So many of us are caught up in the gotcha moments of political back and forth over Israel. Leifer’s book challenges us with the big picture, and that’s a lot harder to mean-tweet away.
After news of the ban hit social media and various news outlets, the bookstore’s owner, Daniel Power, apologized and fired the employee, who he said acted without permission and against store policy. The event was rescheduled for Monday evening at the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights.
But news of the lockout and the image of a hapless Leifer and Bachman standing outside their suddenly closed event space provoked a cackling roar of social media finger pointing from Jews who disagree with Leifer.
“I guess life comes at you fast when you spend your career making dizzying academic arguments against the existence of a Jewish state, only to be told, ‘Nice words, Jewboy, leave the store immediately,’ wrote Suzy Weiss in a Free Press essay entitled, “A Reality Check for Woke Jews.”
“Ha ha. An anti-Zionist Jew and a barely Zionist rabbi and they still don’t let you in,” tweeted the owner of an Israel-based PR firm.
Numerous people posted screenshots of a tweet Leifer wrote five years ago saying, “Boycotts, divestments and sanctions are peaceful strategies of resistance to oppression.”
“Care to revisit your priors?” tweeted one poster.
“I supported the face-eating monsters, but I didn’t think they would eat my face,” tweeted George Mason University law professor David Bernstein, echoing a surprising amount of “face-eating” references.
There were some noble responses, like that of Mizrahi Bookstore in Brooklyn, which sells used religious and secular Jewish books and instantly offered to host the event. But most of Leifer’s fellow Jews piled on with glee.
If you read Leifer’s book, all of the cruel snark from fellow Jews in response to his event cancellation underscores his key points, and makes Leifer’s voice even more important.
Despite what his critics suggest, Leifer does not ignore the antisemitism that is the root of, or has taken root in, the “Death to Israel” crowd.
“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,” he wrote. “Antisemitism on the left takes a different form than on the right, but it is no less real.”
“American Jewish life is perhaps more contentious, more incoherent, and more disorganized than at any point in the last seventy-five years,” he writes.
The three pillars that upheld a vibrant American Jewish life — Americanism, liberalism and Zionism — have cracked, according to Leifer. The belief in America’s promise and exceptionalism was shaken by the rise of right- and left-wing antisemitism. The post-war Jewish liberal consensus faltered in the face of neoconservatism from the right and more strident civil rights activism on the left, leaving Jews divided or ideologically adrift. And Zionism, which became the primary expression of American Jewish life and identity following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, evolved into a source of deep division as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its recurrent wars in Gaza dragged on.
“What the American Jewish establishment fails to understand,” Leifer writes in Tablets Shattered, “is that far more than Hamas’s rockets, or left-wing pro-Palestinianism on U.S. campuses, the real threat to Israel’s survival is a return to the status-quo ante—to the undemocratic one-state reality. The October 7 attacks proved that the occupation-management paradigm is unsustainable and guarantees only the loss of future lives.”
If you care about Israel, Israelis and American Jewish life, this is the core, uncomfortable truth. It may be that some of the anti-Israel crowd are funded by Iran or report to Chinese overlords. It’s true the campus protesters ignore atrocities against hundreds of thousands of innocents in Sudan, or against Uyghur Muslims in China. There’s a special place in hypocrisy hell for undergrads camping out against Israel in tents made in China.
But none of that changes the demographic and moral calculus that Israel faces, something that the Internet hyenas have failed to engage with.
The best hasbara in the world, the greatest army, the cleverest tweets, won’t change the immutable fact that 14 million Jews and Arabs live between the river and the sea, and no one is going anywhere, and the only road forward involves compromise.
It’s the message Vice President Kamala Harris delivered during her acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President — to thunderous applause — and it’s the message courageous Israelis and Palestinians want us American Jews to share.
“The overarching necessity to separate from the Palestinians remains as great as ever,” Gen. (Ret.) Yair Golan, one of the heroes of Oct. 7 and now the head of the Democratic Israel party, wrote this week in Haaretz, “and contrary to the common wisdom, the fundamental idea behind the Oslo Accords and the Gaza Disengagement was correct — the need to divide the land and separate from the Palestinians.”
Leifer makes that same point in his book’s conclusion, not as the anti-Zionist caricature he’s been turned into on social media — he is not anti-Zionist — but because that’s where logic and a true love of Israel inevitably leads.
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