Here's an interview/argument I had with Shlomo Sand on why he's stopped being Jewish

Shlomo Sand Is Not Jewish Any More

November 10, 2014

by Philip Kleinfeld

Shlomo Sand (Photo courtesy of Verso)

​In his new book Why I Stopped Being A Jew, the controversial historian Shlomo Sand tells an anecdote many that have visited Ben Gurion Airport, outside Tel Aviv, will be familiar with hearing.

Sand is waiting in line at a check-in-desk when his eyes catch the gaze of an Israeli Arab woman sitting on a bench nearby. She's been taken from the queue by two security guards for no reason except the headscarf that marks her out as "other". Shlomo looks on anxiously but nobody seems to care. A few minutes later he reaches the front desk and swans through to the departure lounge without the slightest trouble.

"It was a routine embarkation scene," he says. "In the national state of Jewish immigrants, indigenous Palestinians remain suspect."

In the past, these systems of privilege and power never stopped the Israeli academic from defining as a secular, non-religious Jew, however much they bothered him. And why should they? For all the difficulties people have in separating them, Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing.

But now, in his late 60s, Shlomo Sand isn't so sure. His latest book – published in English by Verso last month and part of a trilogy on Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity – is a bitter, provocative resignation from an identity he no longer wishes to have.

"It's unsupportable for me to define myself as a Jew," he tells me as we sit down at a restaurant in Central London. "In a place that declares itself a Jewish state and not a state for all its citizens I can no longer do this".

For such a controversial figure, Sand is a likeable man. He's passionate, he's angry, and despite the challenges of being on the left in Israel, he's unsparingly honest. But he's also tired. Tired in the obvious sense: at 68 his schedule is astonishingly busy. And tired in a much wider, political sense. Israeli society, he says, is one of the most "racist" and "oppressive states in the western world" – a place where being a Jew means "fundamentally and before all else, not being an Arab".

Over the years Sand has fought against this through his writing. Six years ago he published a book called The Invention of the Jewish People, a profoundly controversial work which explored and challenged the way Zionist historiography uses and abuses Jewish history. Four years later he wrote The Invention of the State of Israel, an equally polemical attack on the set of "myths" that he believes underpin Jewish claims to the land of Israel.

Both were well read in his home country. His first was a bestseller for 19 weeks; his second topped the charts for ten. But neither has had any real impact on the direction he feels Israeli society is going in. And looking at him across the table – dressed in dark colours, with dyed black hair – that impotence seems to have left its mark.

"I've lost hope," he says, leaning forward, his face drawn. "Everywhere you have racists. But racists in London and France excuse themselves. In Israel nobody excuses themselves. When I was younger it wasn't so open. Today, Israeli society is from one side racist and ethnocentric and from the other so bound up in the mythos of the Jewish land that no political figure can liberate it from the occupied territories."

At the centre of Sand's political critique is a conception of nationality and citizenship that has, he says, consigned at least a quarter of those living within Israel's gree​n line – anyone who is not the son or daughter of a Jewish mother – to institutional discrimination. And it's this analysis of Israeli society and his own privilege within it that forms the starting point of his resignation.

"The victims of yesterday have become the hangmen of today," he tells me with the kind of provocation that makes most of the Jewish world hate him. "My parents and grandparents lived in a society where they were oppressed by privileged people. What we are doing in Israel is the same thing. I decided to declare myself not a Jew because I don't want to be a privileged person."

Young British Jews protesting against Israel (Photo by Philip Kleinfeld)

It's an understandable position. Sand was born in 1946 in a displaced people's camp in Austria. His Polish Jewish mother was a survivor of the holocaust and he knows, more than most, what racism looks like. But there seems to be something missing in his argument. Would ceasing to be a Jew have any real affect on the institutional structures that enforce your privilege, I ask? Is the problem in Israel Jewish identity or a set of ethnocentric institutions that reward that identity over others? Why should Zionism and Israel structure Jewish identity anyway?

"I am not a Jew in any sense of the term," he says, getting more and more animated as I press him. "I am not Orthodox, I am not Chasidic, and I think insisting to be a Jew at the beginning of the 21st century is a negative identity."

It's hard to find room to speak when Sand is in full flow. We've sat in the restaurant for around 40 minutes and neither of us has ordered anything to eat. Only five minutes before we met Sand was speaking to the BBC. An hour or so after we part, he's talking to a crowded and largely hostile lecture hall at SOAS.

And yet his sense of urgency and anger doesn't seem to dwindle. Perhaps that's because he has so much to say. How I Stopped Being A Jew is at its best when looking at Israel, but Sand's reasons for standing down, I learn, go far beyond the country he lives in.

For him, as for many others, contemporary Jewish life, both inside and outside Israel is deeply attached to two fundamentally negative forms of identity: the memory of the Shoah (holocaust) and modern anti-semitism. Even among Jews that are not direct descendants of holocaust survivors, the trauma of that event serves as the basis on which Jewish identity is grounded and Israeli state violence is legitimised. And it's that Judaism that Sand is most familiar with seeing and hearing, and wishes so strongly to leave behind.

"Because secular Jews cannot define themselves culturally, they are defining themselves as descendants of the Shoah," he says. "As the victim of the Nazis. It makes me crazy. To define yourself after a tragedy of the past always has negative results."

At the beginning of the 21st century most of my generation have become shitty, reactionary conservatives.

But why give up I ask? Sure, secular Jews are obsessed with Israel. Yes, you're right to question the meaning of a secular identity grounded in past suffering. But why use that as a reason to throw in the towel? Why not use it to build something positive? Why not do what so many other Jews have done and construct a new form of identity? One based on the reb​els and mave​ricks that so many left-leaning Jews draw upon.

"Because they died," he snaps back, interrupting me during my question. "At the beginning of the 21st century most of my generation have become shitty, reactionary conservatives. And the people that I identified with are now on the margins of the Jewish community and establishment, too weak to fight it."

By this stage Sand and I are arguing. His tone shifts between angry and solemn, loud and quiet. At times he's seems exasperated with me. Since an extract of his book was published in the Guardian a few weeks ago, he's been inundated with emails, many of them from Jews unable to accept his resignation.

It's the same later that evening, at a lecture he gives at SOAS. One member of the audience accuses him of hypocrisy, another slams him – rightly in my opinion – for an incredibly slanted section on Jewish ethics that gives comfort to th​ose who root Israel's crimes in Jewish identity.

Even Jewish culture is a problem for Sand – he finds nothing on which his identity can be based. The rich modern Yiddish culture of Eastern and Central Europe, which thrived during the inter-war years in the shape of schools, literature, music and art has, he says, disappeared. "It's composed only with memory. You cannot express a real, dynamic daily culture that is Jewish like that."

What about modern Jewish culture? What about Woody Allen? What about Seinfeld? "Not Jewish humour," he says. "It's Yiddish Russian humour." We carry on arguing but Shlomo has made up his mind.

In a way he just wants to be left alone. And perhaps that's fair. Growing up in Jaffa as a Jew with Arab friends he was acutely aware even as a child what privilege meant. Why shouldn't he be able to opt out of an identity that has caused so much inner turmoil?

But reading the book and hearing him speak, you can't help but feel he wants more than the freedom to define himself as he wishes. This isn't just a book about his identity. This is a book about Jewish identity and about identity politics in general.

Which is a shame because in the end his reasons for ceasing to be a Jew boil down to a mixture of cynicism, and personal disaffection. His resignation is bold, in parts touching, in parts baffling. But it reads much more like a riposte to the reactionary mainstream he's familiar with, than any profound analysis of Jewish identity.

And you can't help but feel like he's picking the wrong fight. One reason Zionism is strong in the diaspora is that cultural life for secular Jews is weak. "With the erosion of belief, God has been replaced by Israel as the credo of the Jewish people," the British Rabbi David Goldberg has said in his book This Is Not The Way.

If Sand wants Jews to think outside of a framework he sees as illiberal and nationalist then he needs to participate, or at least support a project which can rebuild and redefine what Jewish identity means. Because all too often, uncritical defence of Israel fills a vacuum in the life of diasporic Jews.

Does he accept that? Not one bit.

"I'm thinking about a social reality," he reminds me. "I don't speak about a few nice young Jewish people."

For Sand the battle over Jewish identity has already been fought and lost. The "shitty conservatives" have won and the solution for him is simple. From this point onwards Shlomo Sand will cease to be a Jew.