When Joshua Leifer’s new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, was ready to go to press, he feared he wouldn’t be invited to speak about it in synagogues. Instead, to his unaccountable surprise, a Brooklyn bookstore canceled an event because it featured Leifer and a Zionist interlocutor. In his book, Leifer argues that American Jewry is in decline because of the collapse of the non-Orthodox denominations, its abandonment of its labor-movement Lower East Side roots and entry into the bourgeoisie (fulfilling the hopes of those Lower East Side Jews for their children), and its strong ties to Israel, which he finds morally bankrupt.

Allan Arkush, in his review of “this sometimes exasperating yet frequently insightful and elegantly written book,” notes how greatly Leifer misunderstands the connection to Israel:

On the basis of his account, it would seem that American Jews paid scant attention to Israel before the Six-Day War. But then “everything about American Jewish identity changed in the flash of an Israeli Mirage fighter jet scraping over the Sinai Desert,” as Israel quickly and decisively defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Leifer underestimates, to begin with, the extent to which the Holocaust was on American Jews’ minds at the time. He says nothing at all in his book about the impact of the horrifying testimony in the nationally televised Eichmann trial in 1961. . . . Eichmann, and [Leon Uris’s novel] Exodus, and concern for their own relatives and friends in Israel were foremost in the minds of large numbers of American Jews in May and early June of 1967 as they watched the siege of Israel grow more threatening and read about bloodthirsty marches through Arab capitals calling for its annihilation, while the world failed to come to Israel’s aid.

I remember well how more than a thousand deeply worried people congregated in the social hall of our synagogue in the evening of June 5, 1967, who roused themselves to volunteer unprecedented sums for Israel. I know that what they (and others like them all over the country) were soon to feel was not merely a burst of pride at the exercise of Jewish might but an almost incredulous sense of having this time finally escaped the noose.

Yet, writes Arkush, despite “his focus on Zionism and Israel, Leifer’s more fundamental concern is with American Judaism, which he wishes above all to wrench free from the liberal capitalist culture that he argues has weakened, if not ruined, it in all of its forms, with the partial exception of separatist Orthodoxy.”

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.