English

Shlomo Sand : How I Stopped Being A Jew

(An excerpt) From the Guardian Thursday 6 November 2014 02.30 EST Sand, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, is the author of The Invention of the Jewish People (2009), a discursive yet polemical work that systematically undermines the claim that Jewishness is necessary – let alone sufficient – to justify the claims of the Israeli state to the territory formerly known as Palestine. Now comes this short, highly personal text, which repurposes some of these arguments to serve existential ends; The Sand asks the question: what, in this day and age, exactly is a secular Jew? Born in an Austrian displaced persons camp in 1946 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, he grew up in Israel and continues to identify himself as an Israeli, yet he unearths inconsistencies in the Zionist ideological bricolage that explain – at least in part – why a state founded on democratic and socialist ideals has descended into bigotry, intolerance and a lopsided form of what, I think, can only be termed racism. Sand observes that Theodor Herzl and his financial backers were assimilated German Jews, repelled by the Ostjuden who came west, fleeing the Russian pogroms of the late 19th century; the

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