How historian Shlomo Sand "stopped being a Jew"

“Is not the very fact of defining oneself as a Jew within the State of Israel an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices around itself?” the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand asks, and in turn answers in the affirmative in the very title of his latest book, How I Stopped Being a Jew.

Sand is speaking as a secular Israeli Jew, an atheist, who ultimately rejects the idea that he belongs to a certain ethnos simply by virtue of matrilineal descent.

The bulk of the book is devoted to how he came to this conclusion — but as to why, that story is relatively simple. His epiphany began inside Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv when he witnessed a Palestinian citizen of Israelbeing escorted away by security agents while he breezed through check-in, his Jewish nationality stamped on his Israeli identity card.

Privileges

Sand seeks to renounce the privileges that come with being Jewish in Israel, including being identified with the state itself, being able to own land non-Jews cannot, hold jobs non-Jews cannot, live in communities where non-Jews are not allowed, establish colonies on land that does not belong to you and resting assured that you will never be tortured or have your home demolished.

Sand teaches contemporary history at Tel Aviv University. He is best known for The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012). Both of those works did much to demolish Zionist propaganda myths...