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Norman Finkelstein

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For other uses, see Norman Finkelstein (disambiguation).

Norman G. Finkelstein (born December 8 1953) is an American assistant professor of political science at DePaul University. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and has a Ph.D from Princeton University. The son of holocaust survivors, Finkelstein is known for his writings pertaining to the behaviour of the state of Israel, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for his charge that the holocaust is being abused for personal gain and pro-Israeli politics.

Education and career

Finkelstein grew up in New York City; his parents were Polish Jews who moved to New York after surviving Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1974, he completed his undergraduate studies at Binghamton University in New York, after which he studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He went on to earn his Master's degree in political science from Princeton University in 1980, and later his PhD in political studies. Finkelstein wrote his Princeton doctoral thesis on Zionism, and it was through this work that he first attracted controversy. Finkelstein has taught at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Hunter College and currently teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.

Publications

Criticism of From Time Immemorial

See article Norman Finkelstein on From Time Immemorial

Praise of Finkelstein's scholarship

Raul Hilberg. "Today he is rather unpopular and his book [The holocaust Industry] will certainly not become a best seller, but what it says is basically true even though incomplete. It is more a journalistic account than an in depth study on the topic, which would need to be much longer."[1]

Noam Chomsky. "A very solid, important and highly informative book [sc., Beyond Chutzpah]. Norman Finkelstein provides extensive details and analysis, with considerable historical depth and expert research, of a very wide range of issues concerning Israel, the Palestinians, and the U.S."[2]

Baruch Kimmerling. "Beyond Chutzpah is the most comprehensive, systematic, and well-documented work of its kind. It is one of the harshest—rational and nonemotional—texts about the daily practices of the occupation and colonization of the Palestinian territories by Israel, and it is an excellent demonstration of how and why the blind defenders of Israel, by basing their arguments on false facts and figures, actually bring more damage than gains to their cause."[3]

Avi Shlaim. "On display are all the sterling qualities for which Finkelstein has become famous: erudition, originality, spark, meticulous attention to detail, integrity, courage, and formidable forensic skills."[4]

Mouin Rabbani. "The scholarship is simply superb. Finkelstein has clearly done his homework, and consulted and mastered a breathtaking range of material: primary sources and documents, scholarly works, reports old and new, correspondence with relevant individuals, and numerous other sources too. He has left no stone unturned."[5]

Criticism of Finkelstein's scholarship

Benny Morris. "Finkelstein and [another writer] share a method: they selectively quote from [my books] what suits their purposes while ignoring, and in Finkelstein's case, ridiculing what doesn't. Neither seems to know anything about 1948 beyond what is to be found in my books and neither marshals sources or material from elsewhere that could serve to contradict my findings." [6]

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. "It is only through such wholesale falsification of evidence that Finkelstein can give surface plausibility to his attack...Finkelstein can make this...argument seem plausible only through out-of-context quotation, the manifest twisting of meaning, and blatant misrepresentation. This is also his standard technique for inventing the aspersion that I have misused sources.

Finkelstein’s gross misrepresentation of my book is just one indication that his attack on it has little to do with any knowledge of, and concern for, scholarship on the holocaust and everything to do with his burning political agenda...Even though the primary material and critical secondary material are in German, he does not cite a single German source because he does not even read German. Nevertheless, the neophyte Finkelstein makes a string of pronouncements (and errors) about what the sources prove, all the while pretending that the enormous amount of evidence that contradicts his wishful assertions and ideological pronouncements do not exist." [7] Finkelstein has responded to Goldhagen. [8]

Peter Novick. "As concerns particular assertions made by Finkelstein…, the appropriate response is not (exhilarating) "debate" but (tedious) examination of his footnotes. Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention… No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites…. I had not thought that (apart from the disreputable fringe) there were Germans who would take seriously this twenty-first century updating of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ I was mistaken." [9] Finkelstein has responded to Novick. [10]

Omer Bartov, reviewing "The holocaust Industry" for the New York Times Book Review. "It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority....Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious." [11]

Marc Saperstein, reviewing "Beyond Chutzpah" for the The Middle East Journal. "Bottom line: if you are looking for a book that gathers for polemical purposes every anti-Israel argument in the arsenal of its opponents, and if you enjoy the rhetorical style of the arrogant academic pit bull, this may be the book for you. If you are looking for balance, fairness, context, a critical weighing of evidence on different sides of a controversial issue - the qualities that one might expect in a publication by a distinguished University Press - you will not find them here." [Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (review) Marc Saperstein. The Middle East Journal. Washington: Winter 2006.Vol.60, Iss. 1; pg. 183, 3 pgs] Finkelstein has responded to Saperstein. [12]

Finkelstein on David Irving and on numbers of holocaust victims

Finkelstein's views on David Irving are expressed in The holocaust Industry, where he states that Irving “notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national socialism has, nevertheless, as Gordon A. Craig points out, made an 'indispensable' contribution to our knowledge of World War II." Finkelstein goes on to endorse Craig's dismissal of Irving's holocaust claims as "obtuse and quickly discredited". The "indispensable" comment (made by Craig and quoted by Finkelstein) is specifically about Irving's contribution to the study of military history on the "German side of the Second World War" (Source: The holocaust Industry, Second Edition, New York: Verso, 2003; page 71-72).

Finkelstein says that he relies on the work of Raul Hilberg for historical facts about the holocaust, and on the basis of that research Finkelstein quotes the numbers of holocaust Jewish victims killed as being 5.1 million [13]. He has also written that "no rational person disputes that the Nazis systematically exterminated 5-6 million Jews".[14] In The holocaust Industry Finkelstein took issue with the numbers of holocaust survivors as quoted by groups seeking holocaust reparations.

Finkelstein and the Anti-Defamation League

Finkelstein has frequently criticized the Anti-Defamation League as an organization dedicated not to defense against anti-Semitism, but to defamation of critics of Israel. Ultimately, he argues, the ADL trivializes real anti-Semitism by "crying wolf" with fraudulent allegations of "the New anti-Semitism." (Source: Beyond Chutzpah, University of California, 2005; Part 1)."

The ADL has described Finkelstein as an "an obsessive anti-Zionist". According to Abe Foxman, in Finkelstein's view "anything that... benefits Israel must be a calculated attempt to cover up Israel's essential depravity"; thus, in The holocaust Industry he "applie[s] this 'logic' to holocaust education initiatives and attempts to obtain compensation for survivors, insisting that these be viewed not as efforts to learn from history or obtain justice for survivors, but as cynical efforts by powerful Jewish groups to somehow 'immunize Israel from criticism' for its alleged human rights abuses." Foxman also criticizes Beyond Chutzpah on similar grounds, arguing that Finkelstein believes "efforts of Jewish organizations and other concerned bodies to oppose anti-Semitism around the world are really nothing more than an effort to 'exploit' or 'manufacture' claims of Jewish suffering in order to 'immunize Israel against criticism' for its 'racist' and 'Nazi'-like treatment of Palestinians and its 'unprecedented assault on international law.'" [15]

The ADL has also described Finkelstein as a "holocaust denier."[16][17] Finkelstein has routinely dismissed this last charge as spurious, pointing to his various descriptions of the holocaust as an indisputable fact, and referring mockingly to "each of the many occasions that ADL has slandered this writer as a 'well-known holocaust denier.'" [1]

Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz

Main article: Dershowitz-Finkelstein Affair
File:Norman finkelstein democracynow.jpg
Norman Finkelstein on Democracy Now!

Shortly after the publication of the book The Case for Israel, Norman Finkelstein accused its author, Alan Dershowitz of "fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense." [18] Saying that Dershowitz lacked knowledge about specific contents of his own book during a debate,[19] Finkelstein also speculated that Dershowitz did not write the book, and may not have even read it. He later cited the presence of "unserious" references, including the web site for a documentary film [20] and an online high school syllabus, as further evidence that the book was ghostwritten.[21]

In addition, Finkelstein noted that in twenty instances that all occur within about as many pages, Dershowitz's book cites from the same passages that Joan Peters used in her book From Time Immemorial, in largely the same order often quoting exactly the same words with ellipses in the same places. In at least two instances, Dershowitz reproduces Peters' errors (see below), from which Finkelstein draws the conclusion that he could not have checked the original sources as he claims.[22] Finkelstein suggests that this copying of quotations amounts to copying ideas.[23] Dershowitz admitted that if "somebody borrowed the quote without going to check back on whether Mark Twain had said that, obviously that would be a serious charge."[24] Writing with Sources, a writing manual cited by Finkelstein, criticizes the practice of quoting sources not actually consulted. [25]

Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan asked former Harvard president Derek Bok to investigate the charges; Bok determined against the charge of plagiarism. [26] Dershowitz threatened libel action over the charges in Finkelstein's book, but the word "plagiarism" was dropped from the text before publication. [27] The charge that Dershowitz was not the true author of The Case for Israel was also removed, the publisher said, because "he couldn’t document that." [28]

Claiming to have first consulted the original sources, Dershowitz says that Finkelstein is simply accusing him of good scholarly practice: citing references he learned of in Peters' book. Dershowitz denies that he used any of Peters' ideas without citation. In a footnote in The case for Israel which cites Peters' book, Dershowitz explicitly denies that he "relies" on Peters for "conclusions or data". [29]. However, in their debate on Democracy Now, Finkelstein cited specific passages in Dershowitz's book where a phrase Peters coined was incorrectly attributed to George Orwell: "[Peters] coins the phrase, 'turnspeak,' she says she's using it as a play off of George Orwell which is all listeners know used the phrase 'newspeak.' She coined her own phrase, 'turnspeak.' You go to Mr. Dershowitz's book, he got so confused in his massive borrowings from Joan Peters that on two occasions, I'll cite them for those who have a copy of the book, on page 57 and on page 153 he uses the phrase, quote, George Orwell's turnspeak. Turnspeak is not Orwell, Mr. Dershowitz, you're the Felix Frankfurter chair at Harvard, you must know that Orwell would never use such a clunky phrase as 'turnspeak.'" [30]

James O. Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth, University of Iowa, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, defended Dershowitz, saying "I do not understand [Finkelstein’s] charge of plagiarism against Alan Dershowitz. There is no claim that Dershowitz used the words of others without attribution. When he uses the words of others, he quotes them properly and generally cites them to the original sources (Mark Twain, Palestine Royal Commission, etc.) [Finkelstein’s] complaint is that instead he should have cited them to the secondary source, in which Dershowitz may have come upon them. But as the Chicago Manual of Style emphasizes: 'Importance of attribution. With all reuse of others’ materials, it is important to identify the original as the source. This not only bolsters the claims of fair use, it also helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism.' This is precisely what Dershowitz did." [31] However, Freedman does not mention the charge levelled by Finkelstein: that Dershowitz, in failing to acknowledge his secondary source (Peters), implicitly presented Peters' research as his own. (See the Harvard Crimson[32]: Finkelstein's professed "bone of contention" is that Dershowitz "didn’t do his own research.")

Despite the attention garnered by Finkelstein's accusations, the bulk of Beyond Chutzpah consists of an essay critiquing the "new anti-Semitism" and chapters contrasting Dershowitz's arguments in The Case for Israel with the views of top human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, asserting proof that Dershowitz has lied, misrepresented and fabricated many of his points in order to protect Israel and hide its record of abundant human rights violations.

Notes

  1. ^ Beyond Chutzpah, p.73.

Quotations

Wikiquote has quotations related to Norman Finkelstein.
  • Noam Chomsky: "I'm delighted to hear that I'll be followed shortly by Norman Finkelstein and would very strongly advise you to come listen to him. Not only [is he] an old personal friend but a person who can speak with more authority and insight on these topics than anyone I can think of. So that should be a memorable occasion and I urge that you not miss the opportunity." [33]
  • Leon Wieseltier: "He's poison, a disgusting self-hating Jew, something you find under a rock." [34]
  • Raul Hilberg: (From the rear cover of the second edition of The holocaust Industry) "When I read Finkelstein's book, The holocaust Industry, at the time of its appearance, I was in the middle of my own investigations of these matters, and I came to the conclusion that he was on the right track. I refer now to the part of the book that deals with the claims against the Swiss banks, and the other claims pertaining to forced labor. I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy. He is a well-trained political scientist, has the ability to do the research, did it carefully, and has come up with the right results. I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough."

Bibliography

Profiles

Reviews

Appearances

Criticisms

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