‘What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?’ Bruce Robbins asks
Philip Weiss writes in Mondoweiss, May 1, 2020:
Bruce Robbins, an English literature professor and political theorist at Columbia University, has long been active in the effort to bring democracy to Israel and Palestine. His latest effort is a documentary titled, “What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?” that he publishes today and that is embedded here.
Shlomo Sand is the Israeli author of groundbreaking works on the history of Zionism, notably “The Invention of the Jewish People“, in 2010; and “The Invention of the Land of Israel”, in 2012.
The documentary is colorful, wry, provocative and probing. What happened to the Jews of biblical times after the destruction of the temple? Why are there so many Jews in the world? Sand asks. Robbins is a former tutor of mine in college (and a friend of the site) and I thought to introduce his documentary with an interview. I began by asking him,
Why did you want to do a documentary about Shlomo Sand?
Bruce Robbins: He knocked my socks off when I read “The Invention of the Jewish People”, a year after it was translated. The first thing to hit me was that they lied to me in all those years of Hebrew school. Frankly the thing that I liked best about Hebrew school was Jewish history partly because it didn’t mean actually learning Hebrew and partly because the stories were just amazing. The first day the history books were handed out I brought mine home and read the whole book. I like stories, and ended up making a life out of them. So the fact that the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE was followed by the exile of the Jews by the Romans– I didn’t remember much of that history, but I remembered that.
And it turns out that this seems to be made up! How is it possible that this could have gone unquestioned for so long? Shlomo Sand looked for the sources and tried to track them all down. It wasn’t just that the exile is very very important to the fundamental Zionist narrative of exile and return; but also I had this personal feeling of having been lied to.