Shlomo Sand is a professor of history whose work critically examines the concepts of nationalism and collective memory. He challenges established historical narratives, focusing on the constructed nature of national identities and the role of historical interpretation. Sand's writing is characterized by a rigorous intellectual approach that encourages readers to question fundamental assumptions about nations and their past. His scholarship is significant for its contribution to ongoing debates about identity, history, and belonging.
The book explores the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly in light of recent violent escalations. Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian, critiques the viability of the two-state solution, arguing it has become a hollow promise amid ongoing settlement expansions and systemic inequalities faced by Palestinians. He delves into historical perspectives within Zionism that advocate for a bi-national federation, proposing that an egalitarian state where Israelis and Palestinians coexist as equals may be the only feasible path towards lasting peace.
Charting the decline of the French intellectual, from the Dreyfus Affair to
Islamophobia The best-selling author of The Invention of the Jewish People,
Shlomo Sand examines the troublesome figure of the French intellectual.
Revered throughout the Francophile world, France's tradition of public
intellectual engagement stems from Voltaire and Zola and runs through Sartre
and Foucault to the present day. The intellectual enjoys a status as the
ethical lodestar of his nation's life, but, as Sand shows, the recent history
of these esteemed figures shows how often, and how profoundly, they have
fallen short of the ideal. Sand examines Sartre and de Beauvoir's unsettling
accommodations during the Nazi occupation and then shows how Muslims have
replaced Jews as the nation's scapegoats for a new generation of public
intellectuals, including Michel Houellebecq and Alain Finkielkraut. Possessing
an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual milieu, Sand laments the
degradation of a literary elite, but questions the value of that class at the
best of times. Drawing parallels between the Dreyfus Affair and Charlie Hebdo,
while mixing reminiscence with analysis, Sand casts a characteristically
candid and mordant gaze upon the intellectual scene of today.
Eminently readable, almost entirely free of theoretical jargon, and ... of
clear importance for both politics and education. -Beverley Southgate, Reviews
in History Sand makes a convincing case against linear history,
retrospectively invented continuities, anachronistic or ahistorical
transpositions. He stresses the necessity of situating one's own point of
view, contextualizing and historicizing events, bringing to light
bifurcations, paths not taken, contradictions and possibilities. And above
all, of never sticking to the views of the dominant and the victors. - La
Marseillaise Shlomo Sand asks ironically and seriously whether Clio's days are
not numbered. In Twilight of History he retraces the broad lines of humanity's
evolution and questions our relationship to antiquity and Christianity as
foundations of Western civilization ... Sand recalls that the discipline owes
its institutionalization to the establishment of nation-states, given the task
of retracing their origins and fuelling their glory, and he asks how far it
can survive these. - Le Magazine Littéraire After Israel, it is Clio, the muse
of history, who is the object of Sand's rigorous examination, with such
painful questions as whether we have to accept the impossibility of a morally
neutral history. Is history not basically a 'concealed theology,' as Nietzsche
saw it, designed to build and maintain the foundation myths of nations? At the
end of an essay illuminated by personal touches, the pillars of historical
self-evidence fall one after the other: Greek 'heritage,' Eurocentrism,
arbitrary periodization. Venturing outside the carapace of his specialization,
Shlomo Sand sees far, and brings a fresh breeze to arid certainties. - Le
Temps The Israeli historian has a magisterial work behind him. No one has
better shown how a national history is fabricated and constructed on the sands
of an ideology. What Shlomo Sand now offers us generalizes this argument, and
we can only salute his erudite presentation of the establishment of history as
a 'science' in the service of national passions. His chapter titles, 'Undoing
the Myth of Origins,' 'Escape from Politics?,' 'Probing the Truth of the Past'
are so many stimulating injunctions. - Lire Sand does not just make the case
against a certain historical narrative, he also rumples the historians,
including such contemporary icons as the founders of the Annales school, Marc
Bloch and Lucien Febvre, whom he reproaches of indifference in their studies
to the great political affairs of their time, Nazism, Stalinism and
Judeophobia. In this time of reform of history teaching and rehabilitation of
great republican myths, Shlomo Sand's simple but indispensable message is to
beware of ourselves. -Denis Sieffert, Politis
Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a “secular Jew.” With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth and its “holocaust industry.” Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what “Jewish” means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.
"Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jeweish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In the process, Sand dismantles the founding myth of the Jewish homeland, This new edition, ten years after the book's first publication in English, includes a new introduction that revisits the controversy the book continues to ignite."--From back cover
