Joshua Leifer, “Tablets Shattered”에 대한 Sam Kriss의 서평에서

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Joshua Leifer의 비소설 "Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life" (2024)에 대한 Sam Kriss의 뉴욕 타임즈 서평 "Who Is the American Jew?"에서:

 

In 2022, I visited the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Jewish settlement that’s wedged like a splinter into its ancient core. According to the settlers I talked to, they’d joyfully revitalized one of the oldest and holiest Jewish cities.

 

It looked like a wasteland. Ruined streets, littered with broken glass and machine-gun nests, in which the settlers had erected sterile apartment buildings, growing like alien crystals.

 

Every few minutes, I’d be stopped by one of the thousands of soldiers who patrol the occupied zone. They’d thumb suspiciously through my foreign passport, and then ask my religion. This is not a question I’ve ever faced from an armed official anywhere else in the world. But when I said I was Jewish, suddenly they grinned. “Jewish, good! Jewish, we like!”

 

When we said “Jewish,” these soldiers and I, did we mean the same thing? In the West Bank, Judaism has become a martial creed: It means that these hilltops belong to me, and I am free to do violence to whoever already lives there.

 

현재로선 Leifer의 책을 읽을 생각은 없다.