A new book by journalist Joshua Leifer claims that Lakewood’s wealth has weakened its “resistance to the values of the secular world.”

Leifer, a 30-year-old journalist for liberal news outlets whose wife grew up in the New Jersey town, argues in the book that Lakewood’s Haredi community has faced a “rise in conspicuous consumption” inconsistent with the values with which it was founded decades ago.

The book, Tablets Shattered, which was published on Tuesday by Penguin Random House – and which garnered national attention when a launch event was canceled in DUMBO – explores the past and future of American Jewish political life, looking, among other things, at changing demographics and shifting views about Zionism.

In a chapter about Orthodox Jews, Leifer looks at Haredi life, mainly through the lens of Lakewood. Using the example of this Haredi town in New Jersey that has grown rapidly in recent years as Hasidim from New York have moved there in droves, he seeks to capture the major issues and contradictions that animate Haredi society today. 

Through his founding of the Haredi community in Lakewood in the 1940s and 1950s, Leifer writes, Rabbi Aharon Kotler sought to create a town that would be free from the problems facing secular society, such as materialism. 

Leifer cites The Legacy of Maran Rav Aharon Kotler, a biography by Yitzchok Dershowitz that claims the late Litvish rabbi “ate ‘without pursuing pleasure,’” and “his household furniture was ‘battered and decrepit’ and mismatched.”

This image stands in stark contrast, in Leifer’s view, to the reality of Lakewood today. As men have gone to work in well-paying jobs, “the houses have grown bigger, the clothing more expensive, the vacations, kosher all-inclusives, more lavish.”

“Some of the poorest places in America are Haredi communities,” Leifer notes. “Lakewood, though, is not an impoverished shtetl. It is a thriving, middle-class town.”

Leifer also criticizes the Haredi grassroots’ explicit alignment with Donald Trump, which contrasts with the more pragmatic, focused way that community leaders have long approached politics. Lakewood, for example, voted overwhelmingly for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. To Haredi businessmen especially, the former president “is a recognizable archetype: the gruff, ill-mannered businessman who nonetheless puts his money behind the right causes,” Leifer writes.

But, Leifer argues, supporting Trump is a “treacherous bargain.” Despite some small wins such as Trump’s commutation of the sentence of businessman Sholom Rubashkin, the right wing’s vision for the future “threatens… the elements of American society—its openness, its tolerance, and, indeed, its liberalism—that have enabled religious Jewish communities to flourish here.”

His observations are not new to the Haredi world, where internal critics — no less influential than Satmar grand rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum — have also warned against Trumpism and materialism.

Elsewhere in the Orthodox chapter, Leifer describes more common liberal critiques of the Haredi community: its insularity, the lack of secular education in boys’ yeshivas, strict gender roles and rejection of LGBTQ people, and challenges faced by Haredi victims of sexual abuse. (Naftuli Moster, a former secular education advocate whom Leifer interviewed for the book, is now the editor in chief of Shtetl.)

Another highlight from the chapter is when Leifer, who was born in what he called a “mainline affiliated” Jewish community, writes about visiting the famous Beth Medrash Govoha with his brother-in-law. Leifer is “jealous” of how close the students at the prestigious kollel feel to God, but what’s perhaps even more charming than what he finds in the study hall is what’s outside in the crowded parking lot.

There, Leifer took note of the students’ dedication to communal living and their casual, but deep, implicit trust in one another. When he and his brother-in-law arrived and parked, they “blocked in several other cars and left the key in the ignition,” something all the other drivers had done as well. “If you needed to get your car out, you could simply get into another person’s car and move it.” 

Despite larger houses, fancier vacations, and the specter of a certain ill-mannered businessman, at least one Haredi quality had apparently survived in spite of secular influence: the strength of Haredi students’ faith in each other. 

And in the end, despite Leifer’s concerns, he argues that the fast-growing size of the Haredi community, in contrast to slower growth in the rest of the Jewish community, contributes to its significance to the future of American Jewry. “Haredi Judaism constitutes perhaps the strongest and most viable alternative to the now fading American Jewish consensus” in which most of the American Jewish community is — or at least, was, once upon a time — patriotic, Zionist, and liberal.