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The American Free Press, which markets books like “The Invention of the Jewish People” ....
New York Times: Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’
Published: November 23, 2009

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity.

Other theories, like the notion that many of today’s Palestinians can legitimately claim to be descended from the ancient Jews, are familiar and serious subjects of study, even if no definitive answer yet exists.

But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics... ‘New York Times’ implies anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic
by Paul Woodward on December 26, 2011 62 mondoweiss.net

When Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski refer to “books like The Invention of the Jewish People and March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” should we assume that these are just ignorant journalists making a grossly inappropriate association, or are they purposefully trying to mislead their readers?

In their New York Times hatchet job on Ron Paul we are told that “white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed.”

White supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists? In the minds of these reporters, anyone who promotes the idea that Israel should become a state of all its citizens — Jews, Arabs and others — apparently looks like a political bedfellow of the likes of Stormfront or the Militia of Montana.

The article reports on the appeal that Ron Paul has among some white supremacists and survivalists and yet says nothing on the anti-Zionist element. Rutenberg and Kovaleski were apparently content to merely insinuate that there is a link between criticism of Israel and racism.

The closest they come to providing evidence of such an association is the article’s opening sentence where the two books are linked.

March of the Titans: A History of the White Race is by Arthur Kemp, an advocate of white separatism and foreign affairs spokesman for the ultra-right and racist British National Party. Kemp is a Holocaust denier and was “linked to the murderer of the South African Communist party and ANC leader Chris Hani in 1993,” The Guardian reported in 2009.

The Invention of the Jewish People, first published in Hebrew in Israel with the title, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi?, is by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. The book was a bestseller in Israel for several months before being translated into French and English.

Tony Judt wrote: “Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention. Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book.”

Of course Rutenberg and Kovaleski would be unlikely to attach much weight to Judt’s assessment of Sand’s book — Judt was after all one of those dubious anti-Zionists.

The irony about linking anti-Zionists with anti-Semities is that Zionism is a philosophy that has obvious appeal to anti-Semites. Encourage all the Jews to move to Israel — why would the anti-Semites object?

Indeed, the emerging political convergence on the extreme right has been between anti-Semites and Zionists and that’s an unholy alliance that probably finds Ron Paul the least appealing among the GOP presidential hopefuls.