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.' With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the ';chosen people' myth and its ';holocaust industry.' Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what ';Jewish' means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.From the Hardcover edition.