GA: The following is my book review of Shlomo Sand's latest book. It was published a year ago. Following the publication of the English edition of How I Stopped Being A Jew last week, I decided to post it again.
By Gilad Atzmon
Sand’s latest book, How I Stopped Being A Jew, is a tragic testimony made by a morally awakened Israeli Jew who comes to realise that his spiritual, cultural and political existence is contaminated with Judeo-centric exclusivism and is fuelled by ethno-centric racism. Shlomo Sand decides to stop being a Jew – but has he succeeded?
Sand, as we all know, is a wonderful writer; witty, innovative, poetic and fluent, his voice is personal, at times funny, occasionally sarcastic and always genuinely pessimistic.
Sand’s writing is scholarly, deep, reflective and imaginative; however, his scholarship is pretty much limited to French liberal thinking and early post-modernist theory. The outcome is disappointing at times. How I Stopped To Be A Jew is a ‘politically correct’ text, saturated with endless caveats inserted to disassociate the author from any possible affiliation with anyone who may be viewed as an opponent of Jewish power, critical of Jewish identity politics or a challenger of the mainstream historicity of the Holocaust.
“I don’t write for anti-Semites, I regard them as totally ignorant or people who suffer from an incurable disease,” (p. 21/Hebrew edition) writes the author who claims to be humanist, universalist and far removed from Jewish exclusivism.* It all sounds very Jewish to me. When it comes to the Holocaust, Sand uses the same tactic and somehow manages to lose all wit and scholarly fashion. The Nazis are “beasts”, their rise to power metaphorically described as a “beast awakening from its lair.” I would expect a leading historian and ex-Jew to have moved on beyond these kinds of banal clichés.
Sand writes about identity politics and is certainly sensitive to the complexities of this subject. He argues forcefully that nationalism is an ‘invention’, yet, for some reason he attributes some forensic qualities to identity and the politics involved. Perhaps Sand fails to realise that identity politics is actually a form of identification – it is there to replace authenticity. For example, Zionism was born as an attempt to replace Judaic authentic orientation with an imaginary sense of national belonging – Israeli identity is a collection of signifiers set to make the Jew believe that he or she has a past, present and future. Identity is basically a set of symbolic identifiers that evoke a sense of collectivism. If you pierce your right ear, you become a club member, if you sport a kaffiyeh you become a solidarity activist, if you manage to utter a few Israeli sound-bites you may become a Zionist. All these identities lack any authentic depth.
Little Britain, a BBC comedy show, provides us with an invaluable insight into this. Daffyd Thomas (The Only Gay in the Village) exhibits a wide range of gay symbolic identifiers without ever once being engaged in a single homosexual intercourse. So Daffyd, while identifying as gay – politically, socially and culturally – saves himself of the elementary authentic experience as a homosexual.
http://youtu.be/KrlzaBNgz-M
Sand understands that Jewish identity politics is hollow, but he may fail to grasp that all identity politics are hollow. On the contrary, nationalism, which he clearly despises — the bond with one’s soil, heritage, culture, language, landscape, poetry is actually a cathartic experience. Though nationalism may well be an invention as Sand and others insist, it is still an intrinsically authentic fulfilling experience. As we all know, patriotic national feelings are often suicidal – and there’s a reason for this – because just sometimes it manages to integrate man, soil and sacrifice into a state of spiritual unification.