How I Stopped Being a Jew, Shlomo Sand, SOAS University of London

This event was co-hosted by the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) () and the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS (). This book launch and discussion titled “How I Stopped Being a Jew“ was given by Shlomo Sand at SOAS University of London on 14 October 2014. Discussant: Professor David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London The event will be chaired by Professor Gilbert Achcar, SOAS. From the back-cover of his new book: 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.” How I Stopped Being a Jew is his first autobiographical meditation on the problems at the centre of modern Jewish identity and the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth. Sand criticizes t