Israeli historian Shlomo Sand: We (seculars) are not Jews!

The Gospel according to Sand: We are not Jews
 In 'How and When I Stopped Being Jewish,' author and professor Shlomo Sand argues that there is no such thing as a secular Jew. Shlomo Sand - author of "The Invention of the Jewish People" - has just published his third book, though only in Hebrew so far. The literal translation of the title is "How and When I Stopped Being Jewish".

According to Sand, there is no secular Jewish identity, only a religious one. There is, however, a Jewish Israeli identity.

Haaretz highlights:

What connects secular Jews from Tel Aviv with non-believing Jews from Paris or New York? In Sand’s opinion, there is no connection. “Those who are called ‘secular Jews’ don’t have a way of life in common." ...

“The deeper we delve into the subject, the more we have to admit that there is no unifying Jewish culture that is not religious,” he tells Haaretz. “You and I have a day-to-day experience and existence that are very much Israeli. They may have Jewish and Yiddish sources, but they’re Israeli.” ...

"Being a Jew in Israel means, first and foremost, not being an Arab,” he writes, comparing the elevated status of Jews in Israel to that of whites in the American south through the 1960s, French settlers in Algeria before 1962, and white and Afrikaner residents of South Africa before 1994....

The Holocaust has become an important aspect of secular Jewish identity....

“Instead of the old religious identity of the ‘chosen people,’ what arose was an extremely beneficial modern secular ritual of not only ‘the chosen victim’ but also ‘the exclusive victim.’” ...

Thus it is Hitler who has proved the victor of World War II, Sand claims. “Although he was defeated militarily and politically, only some years later the core of his perverted ideology seeped once more to the surface, and today it is alive, kicking and menacing.”

Sand is not referring here to anti-Semitism but to the way he says many Jews use racist doctrine to their advantage. "The perception of the Jews as a nation and a race whose traditional characteristics are passed down through heredity in some invisible way is still very much alive. Yesterday it was simple physical characteristics such as blood or facial structure. Today it’s DNA,” he writes. “Hitler’s desire to remove the Jews from ‘normal’ humanity was fulfilled in a perverted way by the politics of memory adopted by Israel and its followers in the Western world.