Sitting in his office at the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT, Chomsky appears as an avuncular, white-haired presence in baggy blue jeans and a navy crewneck sweater who visibly struggles to retain physical and emotional details against the force of a powerful structuralist imagination. He is a lively conversational presence who enjoys intellectual thrust and parry, and who moves quickly to the attack when challenged. When the tone changes, or a new idea catches his fancy, he steps back and quickly resets. He is less interested in people than he is in ideas, and he is more interested in general rules than in the highly textured specifics that might interest a cell biologist or an historian.

There is a noticeable gap between the incredible quickness of Chomsky’s mind and the unadorned banality of his political rhetoric. While his political tracts decorate the shelves of his outer office, his inner sanctum is lined with flourishing plants and souvenirs from his travels around the world. His bookshelves hold a very Chomskian mix of tattered academic books about linguistics and nicely bound literary volumes about other countries and cultures, displaying a mind that finds equal pleasure in Into Tibet and a Festschrift for Roman Jakobson. Staring out from the wall near the door is a large, saintly looking portrait of Bertrand Russell accompanied by a motto: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” On his desk is a framed photograph of a memorial stone for his wife, the linguist Carol Schatz, who died in December 2008 of cancer.

Chomsky’s political writing can seem like a deliberate casting-off of the habits of mind that made him perhaps the last great thinker of the Enlightenment, so that he could take his place on the intellectual cafeteria line, serving up politically useful slop. The sheer volume of his output, which can seem equally thrilling and nauseating even to people who write for a living, seems at times like a loopy attempted proof for the linguist’s terse and methodical academic work of the 1950s and 1960s, which posited the existence of a fixed set of inborn rules that allow humans to form sentences.

Yet there is also something awe-inspiring about the consistency and breadth of Chomsky’s political writing over the decades that defies even the most dogged attempts to label him a hack. The theory of generative grammar that Chomsky laid out in a series of papers that began with his master’s thesis at the University of Pennsylvania and culminated in his landmark 1957 paper “Syntactic Structures” has to be regarded as one of the most powerful and influential ideas of the 20th century, reshaping crucial debates in the fields of linguistics, behavioral psychology, and cognitive science. It is hard to identify another thinker who has combined Chomsky’s breadth of interest with the depth and productivity of his best ideas, aside from Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein.

I talked with Chomsky about his upbringing in a Jewish home in Philadelphia by Cultural Zionist parents who devoted their lives to the revival of Hebrew language and culture, and about some of the strange bedfellows that he has acquired in five decades of impassioned crusading. I left his office with a sense of a specifically Jewish Chomsky that in three decades of engagement with his political writing, his academic work, and a few dozen of his radio appearances had never really struck me before, and now seems obvious and unavoidable.

You grew up in a home that was heavily influenced by Ahad Ha’am, the father of cultural Zionism.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays. He was the founding figure of what came to be called cultural Zionism, meaning that there should be a Zionist revival in Israel, in Palestine, and it should be a cultural center for the Jewish people. He wrote in Hebrew, which was novel, because Hebrew was then the language of prayer and the Bible. He saw Jews as primarily a Diaspora community that needed a cultural center that had a physical presence, but he was very sympathetic to the Palestinians. In fact he wrote some very sharp essays, after a visit to Palestine, criticizing the way the new settlers were treating the indigenous population. He said, “You can’t treat people like that.” Also, on practical grounds, he didn’t want to create enemies. A Jewish cultural center in Palestine was his ideal.

Now I won’t swear to the precise accuracy of this, because these are childhood memories, but I remember reading together with my father an essay that Ahad Ha’am wrote about Moses. The basic idea was there are two Moseses—the first is the historical Moses, if there was such a person, and the other is the image of Moses that was constructed and came down through the ages and occupies an important place in the national mythology.

Ahad Ha’am was an early advocate of the idea that later became famous with [the Marxist political scientist] Ben Anderson, when he wrote his books about how nations are imagined communities. He said there’s an imagined—I don’t think he used the term—but there’s an imagined Jewish community, in which Moses plays a central role, and it really doesn’t matter if there was a historical Moses or not. That’s part of the national myth, which is a sophisticated version of what [author] Shlomo Sand was trying to get at. Sand debunks the historical Moses, but from Ha’am’s point of view, it makes no difference.

Did you read Nivi’im, the prophets, with your father in Hebrew?

The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, “prophets,” who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called “false prophets.”

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.

Did you imagine yourself as a navi, a prophet, when you were a child reading those texts alone in your room or on Friday night with your father?

Sure. In fact, my favorite prophet, then and still, is Amos. I particularly admired his comments that he’s not an intellectual. I forget the Hebrew, but lo navi ela anochi lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet, I’m not the son of a prophet, I’m a simple shepherd. So he translated “prophet” correctly. He’s saying, “I’m not an intellectual.” He was a simple farmer and he wanted just to tell the truth. I admire that.

Did religion play a role in the life of your home? Did your mother light Shabbat candles?

We did those things, but they were­—I don’t know how you grew up, but my parents were part of the Enlightenment tradition, the haskalah. So you keep the symbols, but it doesn’t involve religious faith.

At the age of 10 I came to the conclusion that the God I learned about in school didn’t exist.

I remember how I did that. I remember it very well. My father’s family was super Orthodox. They came from a little shtetl somewhere in Russia. My father told me that they had regressed even beyond a medieval level. You couldn’t study Hebrew, you couldn’t study Russian. Mathematics was out of the question. We went to see them for the holidays. My grandfather had a long beard, I don’t think he knew he was in the United States. He spoke Yiddish and lived in a couple of blocks of his friends. We were there on Pesach, and I noticed that he was smoking.

So I asked my father, how could he smoke? There’s a line in the Talmud that says, ayn bein shabbat v’yom tov ela b’inyan achilah. I said, “How come he’s smoking?” He said, “Well, he decided that smoking is eating.” And a sudden flash came to me: Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. He can’t figure these things out. If that’s what it is, I don’t want anything to do with it.

And what did your father say?

I was just thinking about that. He just quoted the line to me and then explained, “He thinks he is eating.”

Your father, Zev, was one of the significant Hebrew grammarians of the past century, and you did your early academic work on medieval Hebrew. Did something interest you about the structure of the language, or was it just available to you as the language in your home?

It wasn’t the language in the home. We spoke English. My parents would never utter a word of Yiddish, which was their native language. You have to remember there was real kulturkampf going on at this time, in the 1930s, between the Yiddish and the Hebrew tendencies. So we never heard a word—my wife either—of Yiddish. Hebrew was the language we studied. And then when I got to be a teenager I was immersed in novels.

You returned to Hebrew for your college thesis.

When I got to college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. I was in linguistics then, so I figured, “OK, I’ll write about Hebrew. It’s kind of interesting.” I started the way I was taught to: You get an informant, and you do field work and take a corpus. So I started working with an informant, and I realized after a couple of weeks, this is totally idiotic. I know the answers to all the questions. And the only thing I don’t know is the phonetics, but I don’t care about that. So I just dropped the informant and started doing it myself.

My work was more or less influenced by the style of medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammar. It was historical analysis. But you can translate the basic ideas into a kind of a synchronic interpretation, a description of the system as it actually exists, and out of that came the early stages of generative grammar, which nobody looked at.

So your theory of generative grammar in its early stages came out of your study of medieval Hebrew and Arabic?

Yes. When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was actually reading the proofs of my father’s doctoral dissertation, which was on David Kimhi’s Hebrew grammar, and then I read articles on the history of the language and Semitic philology. When I got to college I started studying Arabic. I wanted to learn Arabic, and I got pretty far.

It’s the same basic structure, but Hebrew is based on a root vowel pattern distinction, so there’s a root, which is neither a noun nor anything else, and it’s not plural or past tense or anything. It’s a root, typically a tri-consonant root, with a couple of exceptions, and it fits into any large array of different vowel patterns, which determine what its function is in a sentence. Is it a verb? Is it a noun? If it’s a verb, is it third-person plural, does it agree with some other nouns? The whole language builds up from that. And that’s how I treated it in my early work, which is kind of the way it was done in traditional grammar. Now people do it differently, rightly or wrongly.

Of course the modern Hebrew language is quite different. I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

When you were refused entry to the West Bank recently by the Israeli Interior Ministry, did you talk Hebrew to the people who sent you back to Jordan?

I could’ve, but I didn’t. I’ve done it before, at security. Back in the 1980s I attended a conference in Jerusalem, and on the way out of the country you have to go through security. There were two of us, and the other guy was a friend who I don’t think is Jewish, and they opened everything in his suitcase, took out his dirty socks. There were things in my suitcase I didn’t want them to see. It was during the First Intifada and I had managed to break curfew a couple of times and get into places under curfew until we were picked up by soldiers. I had found a container for a grenade that had stamped on it the name of some place in Pennsylvania, and I wanted to bring that home.

I also had a lot of illegal pamphlets. Israeli security could never find out how they were circulating these pamphlets. In fact it was young kids jumping over rooftops. So I had a collection of these  pamphlets that I wanted to bring home, and I was hoping I wouldn’t get inspected. When I got to the inspection, the woman security officer took my passport, and said, “Oh, you have a weird name.” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Do you speak Hebrew?” So I said, “Yeah.” Then we went on to have a discussion in Hebrew. “Did you visit your relatives, did you have a good time.” And she never bothered to look in my suitcase.

Were there any gentiles in your parents’ world?

Practically not. In fact there weren’t even Yiddish-speaking Jews. They lived in if not a physical ghetto then in a cultural ghetto. Their friends were all people deeply involved in the revival of the Hebrew language and cultural Zionism. I happened to have some non-Jewish friends, but that’s just from school.

Describe Mikveh Israel, the synagogue that you grew up in and where your father first taught.

Well, Mikveh Israel was actually Sephardic, so I grew up in the Sephardic tradition. It was kind of the elite synagogue in Philadelphia, like the Portuguese synagogue in New York. It was Sephardic because the original settlers were Sephardic Jews from Holland. So we had a Dutch, actually originally Portuguese, rabbi, and the hazan was from Morocco. We learned all the Sephardic rituals, and pronunciation and everything, even though everyone in the community was from eastern Europe. It was kind of the Jewish elite, but it was also the center of a Hebrew renaissance-oriented small society. The people were either teachers, rabbis, there were businessmen and others, but they all shared a passionate interest in Hebrew cultural revival. My father was the head of the school. My mother was running the Hadassah meetings.

Did your mother also come from a religious family?

She came to America with her family when she was 1 year old. They were so religious that she told me that when she was a teenager, talking with her girlfriends on the street, if she saw her father coming toward them, she would get them to cross the street so that she didn’t have to suffer the embarrassment of having her father walk past her and not acknowledge her because she was a girl. It was a very Orthodox family. Of course, they grew up here, and the kids lost it quickly. My father came here in 1917. He and my mother shared many interests and experiences in common.

They were so dedicated. I remember friends of my father and mother, a couple of women, who when they called a department store downtown, they would insist on talking Hebrew, in the hopes of convincing them to hire a Hebrew-language operator. I mean they all spoke English. It was real dedication. It had to be. How do you revive a dead language?

Was that what motivated you to live in Israel?

My wife and I were there in ’53. We lived in a kibbutz for a while and planned to stay, actually. I came back and had to finish my Ph.D. We thought we’d go back.

Was it the idea of the kibbutz, or was it the fact of speaking Hebrew, or what was it?

It was political. I was interested in Hebrew, but that wasn’t the driving force. I liked the kibbutz life and the kibbutz ideals. It has pretty much disappeared now, I should say. But that time was incredible in spirit. For one thing it was a poor country. The kibbutz I went to, and I picked it for this reason, was actually originally Buberite. It came from German refugees in the 1930s and had a kind of Buberite style. It was the center for Arab outreach activities in Mapam. There was plenty of racism, I should say. I lived with it. But mostly against Mizrahim.

When you think of the motivations of people like your parents or the people who founded those Mapam kibbutzim, you don’t think of those motivations as being inherently linked to some desire to oppress others?

By then I was old enough to separate from my parents. I’d been on my own intellectually since I was a teenager. I gravitated toward Zionist groups that were not in their milieu, like Hashomer Ha’tzair.

My father grew up in Hashomer.

I could never join Hashomer because in those days they were split between Stalinist and Trotskyite, and I was anti-Leninist. But I was in the neighborhood. It was a Hashomer kibbutz that we went to, Kibbutz Hazore’a. It’s changed a lot. We would never have lasted. It was sort of a mixed story. They were binationalists. So up until 1948 they were anti-state. There were those who gravitated toward or who were involved in efforts of Arab-Jewish working-class cooperation and who were for socialist binationalist Palestine. Those ideas sound exotic today, but they didn’t at the time. It’s because the world has changed.

Continue reading: Hezbollah, Robert Faurisson, and Israeli crimes. Or view as a single page.

If Israel is going to be Jewish and fully democratic, it will have to find other ways for non-Jews to become Jews, or to identify with Jews, than the forbidding Orthodox conversion that is currently their sole societal option. A revival of historical interest in how, in certain times and places in the past, non-Jews have been successfully integrated into the Jewish people in large numbers, and without too many questions asked, might be a contribution to such a process.

Indecent Proposal [TNR]

Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
Inventing Israel [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: ‘Times’ Weighs In on ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’

In the course of her piece, Cohen puts forth Sand’s assertion that Jews and Palestinians share DNA and notes that “early Zionists and Arab nationalists touted the blood relationship as the basis of a potential alliance in their respective struggles for independence.” That kinship claim was later dropped, she observes, when it failed to help achieve political goals. Similarly, Sand retreads the idea (never proven and more or less accepted as myth) that the Jews descended from the Khazars, a group in the Caucasus which allegedly converted to Judaism in the 8th century, in order to suggest that the Jews can’t claim Israel as an ancestral home.

Ultimately Sand’s book, and others like it, forces us to grapple with the question of why some misconceptions gain traction and others do not. “A mingling of myth, memory, truth and aspiration,” writes Cohen, “envelopes Jewish history, which is, to begin with, based on scarce and confusing archaeological and archival records…. He is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of—shaping the material to fit a narrative.”

Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’ [NYT]
Related: Inventing Israel [Tablet]

Now suppose that none of it is true.

That’s the thesis of a new book, The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand, who argues that the Jews were not in fact exiled from Israel, and that the bulk of modern Jewry does not descend from the ancient Israelites Rather, he claims, they are the children of converts—North African Berbers and Turkic Khazars—and have no ancestral ties to the land of Israel. Zionism is not a return home, Sand writes, it is the tragic theft of another people’s land. As such, Israel is not the political rebirth of the Jewish nation—it’s a complete fabrication.

Predictably, The Invention of the Jewish People generated a torrent of controversy when it was published in Hebrew last year. Sand’s arguments were hotly debated in newspaper columns and academic journals, with Tom Segev, the post-Zionist “new historian,” acclaiming it as “one of the most fascinating and challenging books” to arrive in Israel in a long time. In March, the French translation, which has sold 45,000 copies—a large number for an academic historian—received the prestigious Aujourd’hui Award, which is given to the year’s best non-fiction book.

But for many—including Sand himself—the real test of the book’s significance will take place October 19, when the left-wing publisher Verso Press brings out the English edition of The Invention of the Jewish People. Supporters and detractors alike are closely watching to see if the book becomes a mainstream publishing controversy or vanishes into the esoteric precincts of academe. “America will be the real battle,” said Sand, who arrives on these shores this month for a series of appearances in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

There is, perhaps, a precedent for this type of work. In 1976, the anti-Communist writer Arthur Koestler published The Thirteenth Tribe, a tendentious little book to which Sand owes a great intellectual debt. Koestler argued that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the descendants of Khazars, a Turkic people who dominated the Russian steppes from the mid-7th century to the beginning of the second millennium. Around 740, the ruling elite of Khazaria converted to Judaism. Koestler speculated that after the collapse of Khazaria those converts drifted westward into Poland, forming the nucleus of Eastern European Jewry. Lacerated by critics, Koestler’s book was nonetheless propelled onto the best-seller list for a few weeks. “Today,” Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, told me, “The Thirteenth Tribe is a combination of discredited and forgotten.”

But Koestler and the Khazar theory he advanced lives on in the fever swamps of the white nationalist movement, where Sand’s ideas have already stirred some interest. “Sand is not publishing this book at a dignified conference in Bern at which scholars of the Middle East debate the origins of the Jews,” said Goldberg, also a Tablet Magazine contributing editor. “He is dropping manufactured facts into a world that in many cases is ready, willing, and happy to believe the absolute worst conspiracy theories about Jews and to use those conspiracy theories to justify physically hurting Jews.” Goldberg views The Invention of the Jewish People as part of a growing body of work designed not only to discredit the idea of Jewish nationalism, but also the idea of Jews themselves. “It is nothing new,” he added, “We survived Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe; we can survive this.”

In a recent interview, Sand acknowledged that his reinterpretation of Jewish history might serve the interests of anti-Semites and other enemies of the Jewish state. “But as a historian my commitment is foremost to what I believe is the truth,” he told me.

But what is Sand’s truth? In the late 19th century, he argues, Jewish intellectuals like Heinrich Graetz, Moses Hess, and Simon Dubnow refashioned Judaism—a diverse religious civilization—into a homogenous collective. Sand writes that they “imaginatively constructed a long, unbroken genealogy” for the Jews out of fragments of religious memories. Prior to that, “world Jewry had been a major religious culture, not a strange, wandering nation.” This historical hoax was later embraced as a useful fiction by the Zionist movement: “To achieve their aims, the Zionists needed to erase existing ethnographic textures, forget specific histories, and take a flying leap backward to an ancient, mythological and religious past.”

“Judaism,” Sand said, “was a very important civilization, and still is in some ways. But the Jews are not a people because they are not bound together by a secular culture like other nations.” Israeli culture, he noted, is secular but it is distinct from Jewish culture in other parts of the world. “Israel does not have a Jewish cinema, a Jewish theatre, or a Jewish literature; it has an Israeli cinema, an Israeli theater, and an Israeli literature,” Sand said. Moreover, he thinks that few Jews living outside of Israel have a stake in Israeli culture, a disinterest amplified by their lack of Hebrew. “A nation is a people that want to be sovereign, but most Jews don’t want to live under Jewish sovereignty.” The idea that a cohesive national identity unites Jews in New York, Moscow, London, and Paris is what Sand called “an ethnocentric myth.”

Born in Austria in 1946, Sand spent his first two years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. His parents, Polish Holocaust survivors, immigrated to Jaffa in 1948. “My parents did not come to Israel by choice,” he said. “For them it was a tragedy. All their life, they couldn’t accept it. And I don’t blame them. Most of the people who came to Israel did not choose to do so; they were not Zionists.” Sand describes himself as a post-Zionist, but his politics are eclectic. “I am not a Zionist because I am a liberal democrat,” he said. “It is not possible to have a Jewish and a democratic state. It would be like America defining itself as a Protestant state. It makes no sense.”

In the late 1960s, Sand joined Matzpen, a now defunct radical group that advocated the de-Zionization of the Israeli state. He left when the party line drifted from challenging Israel’s identity as a Jewish state to questioning whether Israel should exist at all. The experience impressed upon Sand the importance of tempering his politics with pragmatism. “Unlike a lot of other leftists I am not in favor of a one-state solution,” he said referring to the proposed incorporation of Palestinians and Jews into a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. When pushed, Sand will admit that he is not “morally opposed” to one-state but that it is merely a “dream,” not a serious political project. “To have one state for the two societies you need the consensus of both societies, and right now most Israelis don’t want that,” he said. The Invention of the Jewish People is dedicated to the “memory of the refugees who reached this soil and those who were forced to leave.” But Sand opposes anything more substantial than a token right of return for Palestinian refugees. “You cannot recognize Israel’s right to exist and recognize the right of return for six million Palestinians. It is an oxymoron,” he said.

While Sand is quick—and arguably disingenuous—to portray his personal politics as “very moderate,” he doesn’t flinch from describing his work on Jewish historiography and Israel as “radical” and “courageous.” Verso has used adjectives like “bold” and “ambitious” to promote his book. But Hebrew University historian Israel Bartal, among others, has pointed out that Sand’s politics have undermined the credibility of his scholarship. “Sand’s desire for Israel to become a state ‘representing all its citizens’ is certainly worthy of a serious discussion,” Bartal wrote in Haaretz, “but the manner in which he attempts to connect a political platform with the history of the Jewish people from its very beginnings to the present day is bizarre and incoherent.”

Some of Sand’s natural sympathizers fear that the inherent shock value of The Invention of the Jewish People will cause the American media to sensationalize Sand’s thesis. New York University historian Tony Judt, a proponent of the one-state solution who has battled vociferously with critics in the United States, worries that Sand’s book will be received here as just another polemic. “It’s a much more reasoned and thoughtful book than that,” Judt said in an interview. He credits Sand with “blowing open” the “core guiding myth of Zionism.” By demonstrating that Jews are in fact a complete ethnographic and national hodgepodge, Judt argued, Sand’s work normalizes Jewish history. “I hope the book will remove from serious conversation any mention of ancient rights, ancient privileges, or who was given what land by which authority—whether God or King David,” Judt said, adding that an understanding of Jewish history must give way to an honest accounting of contemporary Israeli problems. Such a possibility, Judt added, “is surely good news for everyone.”

But in the Israeli academy Sand’s book has not been received as good news. Alexander Yakobson, a history professor at Hebrew University, said that Sand’s interpretation of Jewish history “gives a bad name to flimsiness.” To him, even if Sand had made a compelling argument about Jewish origins, it would have no bearing on whether the Jews can be considered a nation. “In order to be a people in the modern sense you do not have to be a descent group,” Yakobson said. “What makes a people is their self-determination to regard themselves as a people.” Israel Bartal charged Sand with “intellectual superficiality” and “twisting the rules governing the work of professional historians.” Sand’s alleged sins include the use of misleading citations, disrespect for historical details, and a slippery tendency to present extreme theories as though they reflect the scholarly consensus. Anita Shapira, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, wrote what many believe was the definitive take-down review of Sand’s book for The Journal of Israeli History. In it, Shapira wrote that she found something “warped and objectionable in the assumption that for Jews to integrate into the Middle East they, and they alone of all the peoples in the region, must shed their national identity and historical memories and reconstruct themselves in a way that may (perhaps) find favor with Israeli-Palestinians.”

Yet this barrage of criticism has done little to dampen interest in The Invention of the Jewish People. Translations are underway in a dozen languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian. Sand signed a contract with a Palestinian publisher to release an Arabic-language edition, but the translation was so sloppy that Sand halted publication. “I am very depressed about it,” he said. “I want to write in the preface that I am waiting for an Arab historian to have the courage to write about Arab history in the same way that I wrote Jewish history.”

But at the moment, Sand has his eyes set on America. “I know there are a lot of organized Zionists that cannot accept the sort of criticism I can voice in Israel,” he said. “But I want you to know I am not afraid of Alan Dershowitz.”

Evan R. Goldstein is an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

<B>CORRECTION</B>, November 12: Due to a miscommunication, this article originally attributed to Alexander Yakobson a sentiment he did not express, that Sand’s book is “a pack of lies.” It has been deleted.