A British friend, curious about my attachment to things Jewish, recently put the question to me most starkly: “Hasn't that Sand fellow settled the Jewish business once and for all?”
The “Sand fellow” is Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian best known for claiming that there is no such thing as a Jewish people and, in a separate but related move, renouncing his own Judaism. The titles of his books—The Invention of the Jewish People, The Invention of the Land of Israel, How I Stopped Being a Jew—leave little to the imagination. Within the ideologically-freewheeling precincts of Israeli academia, his work is accorded a certain respect (though his influence in Israeli society at large is negligible), but outside of Israel, and particularly in Europe, he and his claims are taken seriously by the serious sorts of people—like my well-meaning British friend.
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