Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, as might be guessed from its title alone, caused something of stir when published last year. Its review in the New York Times was one of the most widely read pieces on the web, remarkably for a history book, and it has become the sort of book that you are for or against dependent on your politics, irrespective of whether you’ve actually read it.
UCL’s Michael Berkowitz sees this hype as a worrying consequence of ‘an apparent willingness and passion to simplify and distort scholarly discourse in order to produce a seductive, monocausal explanation’. You can read his thoughts in full here.