Shlomo Sand
Shlomo Sand studied history at the University of Tel Aviv and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris. He currently teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. His books include The Invention of the Jewish People, On the Nation and the Jewish People, L’Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900, Georges Sorel en son temps, Le XXe siècle à l'écran and Les Mots et la terre: les intellectuels en Israël.Blog
Authors speak out to save owner of Jerusalem bookshop from deportation
The bookshop at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem is known worldwide for being the best place to buy English-language bookshops in Israel or Palestine. Its owner Munther Fahmi has run the bookshop for 13 years, but now faces deportation despite being born in Jerusalem. In addition to the injustice of this, the closure of the bookshop would impoverish the cultural life of Jerusalem, and to debate and dissent in Israel. Please sign the petition to stop Munther being deported.
Munther Fahmi is a well-known figure in Jerusalem's diplomatic community and among the city's foreign press corps. A visit to his small bookstore at the American Colony Hotel is a must for anyone seeking to immerse himself in the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Among his many and well-known patrons are ambassadors, authors and politicians, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
But it appears all the connections in the world are no match for Israel's Interior Ministry, which is now seeking to have Fahmi deported.
"Sand debunks the historical Moses" - Chomsky on Shlomo Sand
In a recent interview for Tablet, Noam Chomsky discusses the idea of Jewish identity, describing the methods that Ahad Ha'am and Shlomo Sand (author of The Invention of the Jewish People and the new On the Nation and the Jewish People) have used to confront national mythmaking:
I remember reading together with my father an essay that Ahad Ha'am wrote about Moses. The basic idea was there are two Moseses-the first is the historical Moses, if there was such a person, and the other is the image of Moses that was constructed and came down through the ages and occupies an important place in the national mythology.
Shlomo Sand on Netanyahu's identity crisis and the impossibility of a ‘Jewish democracy’
Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, writes for Ha'aretz that "Benjamin Netanyahu is unsure of his identity: His insecurity is behind his pointless demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as uniquely Jewish."
Books
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On the Nation and the Jewish People
Two classic texts on nationalism introduced by the author of The Invention of the Jewish People.
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The Invention of the Jewish People
Bestselling new analysis of Jewish history by a leading Israeli historian.
Discussions
Discussions occur on book pages throughout the site. The most recent discussions about the works of Shlomo Sand are listed below.
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Jews and genes
Several critics of Shlomo Sand’s book have seized on recent scientific studies that supposedly proved "that Jewish communities in places as far afield as Europe and the Caucasus are genetically linked, and that their DNA ancestry traces back to the Middle East" and thus that "demonstrate conclusively that the theories propounded by Sand and others ring visibly and unmistakably hollow". Sand himself, in the postface to the paperback edition of his book, argues that: "After exhausting all the historical arguments, several critics have seized on genetics. The same people who maintain that the Zionists never referred to a race conclude their argument by evoking a common Jewish gene. Their thinking can be summed up as follows: ‘We are not a pure race, but we are a race just the same.’ ... As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will." Is Shlomo Sand’s argument—especially where it concerns the role of conversion in the spread of Judaism—vulnerable to objections based on genetic science?