From: Josef Schwanzer
[mailto:donauschwob@optusnet.com.au]
Sent: Friday, 4 July 2008 7:09 PM
A Pariah In Exile
He lost an epic tenure battle, then got barred from Israel. Now, Norman
Finkelstein is back in Brooklyn, with a provocation or two up his sleeve.
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by Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
It has come to this for Norman Finkelstein: Back home in the Brooklyn of his
youth, living alone in his deceased father’s rent-stabilized apartment on
Ocean Parkway, just a few blocks from where the white-hot controversial
professor grew up.
No more loyal students, no more lectures to prepare, no more radio debates with
his arch-enemy, Alan Dershowitz, no more national spotlight; Finkelstein is the
man no one wants, and perhaps for good reason.
A year ago, DePaul University, where he taught political science for six
years, denied Finkelstein tenure in one of the most bruising tenure battles in
recent memory. The story made national headlines, fueled by Dershowitz’s
crusade against Finkelstein’s scholarship.
Finkelstein’s supporters painted the Harvard law professor as an
outside agitator encroaching on
an internal tenure process; some of his students went on a hunger strike in his
support. No major university will touch him now.
“Who wants to go through what DePaul went through with a national
hysteria,” Finkelstein says, shrugging. “To be told I was a
Holocaust denier and a terrorist supporter — would you want me on your
faculty?”
And Israel shut its doors on him in May, barring him from entering the
country; it never gave him a reason, but news reports attributed it to his
strong and highly vocal anti-Israel views, and for associating with elements
hostile to the Jewish State. (Finkelstein says he met with leaders of the
terrorist group Hezbollah during a trip to Beirut in January.) After 18 hours
in detention at Ben-Gurion Airport, he was taken onto a plane and whisked out
of the country.
It’s not hard to see why Finkelstein is anathema in most Jewish
circles, simply beyond the pale. He has struck out — with a vengeance
— at the twin pillars of postwar Jewish life: the Holocaust (which he
calls “the Holocaust industry”) and Israel. The Jewish community, he
argues, has exploited the Holocaust for financial gain, sullying the memory of
the Six Million.
And he has cavorted with Israel’s enemies, meeting with and praising
Hezbollah. During the height of Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, as
Hezbollah was raining rockets down on northern Israel and Israel was bombing
Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut and targets elsewhere in the country,
Finkelstein took the stage at a rally in Brooklyn and intoned, “We are
all Hezbollah.”
So the Pariah of Ocean Parkway is at the low point in his life, his academic
career in shambles. (The only offer of a job has come from a two-year college
he declined to identify that offered a paltry salary for many hours of work.)
Here he sits, in his father’s old apartment, surrounded by framed family
photographs. The photos, along with glowing pictures and notes from DePaul
students that sit on his piano, may be his only comfort as he tries to pick up
the pieces of his career.
Finkelstein may be down on his luck, but the provocateur still seems to have
some fight in him. He spends hours at the computer on his combative,
over-the-top Web site — a video of him debating Dershowitz in a radio
studio is interspersed with clips of Bruce Lee-like martial arts warriors
fighting to the death.
Finkelstein says he’s content with things, that he wants to avoid
further controversy. “I’ve had 15 minutes of fame and then a
half-hour and then 10 hours; I don’t need anymore. ... I’m not
worried about being a pariah,” he says. Yet the title of the new book
he’s working on — “A Farewell to Israel: The Coming Break-up
of American Zionism” — suggests that controversy may yet find him
again, that Finkelstein may be bowed but not broken.
On a muggy late spring day, Finkelstein is walking the old neighborhood around
Ocean Parkway and Avenue W. He grew up here in what was an upper-middle-class
neighborhood in the late-‘50s and early ‘60s, his parents survivors
of the Warsaw Ghetto. He may have absorbed a body blow from DePaul, but at 54
he is lean and trim in a blue T-shirt and khaki shorts, his salt-and-pepper
hair tousled. He maintains a disciplined exercise regimen, jogging and swimming
regularly.
He spent his first eight years in Flatbush and then moved to Mill Basin with
his parents and two brothers until he was 17.
“My parents were devout atheists,” Finkelstein says. (They also
had Communist leanings, according to Haaretz, as did many Polish Jews of
their generation.) “You couldn’t discuss religion in my house even
though my mother’s father was very Orthodox. She said he was like a rabbi.
And my father’s, too.
“My parents were completely Jewish; that’s why they did not feel
they needed to prove they were Jewish,” he says.
It was perhaps because of that that Finkelstein, who says he too is an
atheist, said he never had a bar mitzvah.
“When I was 13, a bar mitzvah was like a coming-out party and to not
have one was shameful,” he recalls. “It was terrible. People would
ask me if I was having a bar mitzvah and I said I was having it in Israel. ...
Not to have a bar mitzvah was a psychologically terrible ordeal, but it gave me
character and taught me how to resist peer pressure.”
Both of his brothers — Henry worked for the city and Richard was a
computer consultant — retired when they turned 50. “I used to joke
that I am still waiting for my first job,” he says with smile.
His brothers are both married and Finkelstein has one nephew. “I
don’t have any regrets not marrying,” he says as he walked by the
bookshelves that line the entranceway to his apartment.
Among the books were several about Karl Marx, another about the Bolshevik
Revolution called, “Ten Days that Shook the World” by John Reed,
books about Hitler, and “Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of
Israel’s National Security and Foreign Policy.”
Finkelstein’s career, though it began with a doctorate in politics at
Princeton University, has been checkered. His thesis sought to expose as a
shoddy piece of research Joan Peters’ best-selling book, “From Time
Immemorial,” which debunked the notion of a Palestinian population
overwhelmed by Jewish immigrants in the Holy Land. His thesis, in turn, was
criticized by many as politically driven, and was supported by few, including
Noam Chomsky, the outspoken critic of Israel’s right to exist.
Finkelstein has had trouble holding a job, bouncing from Rutgers University
to NYU to Brooklyn College and Hunter College.
Despite what he said were solid evaluations at DePaul — in formal
public statements DePaul said Finkelstein is an outstanding teacher and a
prolific scholar — Finkelstein says he saw the writing on the wall when
he first accepted the position. It’s why, he says, he held onto his
father’s apartment for the six years he was in Chicago so that he would
not find himself out of work and out of a home.
“I had the best teaching record at DePaul University,” he
insists, explaining that the evaluation is based upon student assessments and
his writing. He even sailed through the early tenure committees, before the
campaign against him was launched by Dershowitz. (In his book “Beyond
Chutzpah,” Finkelstein had attacked Dershowitz’s “The Case
for Israel” as a fraud.)
“Now I can’t even get an adjunct appointment for one
semester,” he says matter-of-factly. “I lectured in the past year
at 40 universities and I would ask the faculty there about a position and was
told it was out of the question.”
Finkelstein rises from his living room chair and points to the picture of
his mother on the wall above the piano, as if to take his mind off his dismal
job prospects.
“My mother was in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 until 1943,” he
says, strongly denying that his mother was a Nazi collaborator — a charge
leveled by some of his detractors. “She was also in Majdanek and in two
slave labor camps and every member of her family was exterminated – her two
sisters, a brother and mother and father.”
A job as a high school teacher is also out of the question, Finkelstein
says.
“The way they do background checks is to Google your name. With me,
they would get 30,000 Web sites, one-third of them saying I am a Holocaust
denier, a supporter of terrorism, a crackpot and a lunatic. If 30,000 Web sites
are saying that, the assumption is that where there is smoke, there must be
fire. Would you take the time to look through 30,000 Web sites?”
“I save my complaints for my friends,” he says when asked his
reaction to such Web sites.
“That’s why we have friends in the world — to chew their
ears off.”
Peter Novick isn’t one of those friends. The author of “The
Holocaust in American Life” has been critical of Finkelstein’s
credibility and scholarship, saying that “a lot of [his writing] was pure
invention” and that not all of his footnotes are accurate.
Novick said that in his own book he explored how “much of American
Jewry has centered on the Holocaust ... for Finkelstein it’s a racket,
with self-aggrandizing Jewish elites who use it to boost their own power; it is
nasty and over-the-top stuff.”
He said he feels sorry that Finkelstein has been unable to secure another
teaching job, but Novick said Finkelstein knowingly refused to do what it takes
to get tenure: publish academically respectable material in academic journals.
“He was much more engaged in doing political rather than academic
work, and that is not how you get a regular academic job,” Novick
explains. “I’m not saying it in a way to blame him. He made his
choice. ... He raises abrasiveness to a matter of principle.”
“On balance,” Novick continues, “would it be a good thing
if he had a job? Yes. The idea of this guy in his 50s who has done this all his
life now being cut off at the knees is sad.”
He may not have a job, but Finkelstein’s new book, yet to have a
publisher, is certain to stir more controversy. Its premise is that American
Jews who “embraced Israel [after the Six-Day War] in 1967 — seeing
it as a liberal state — now are embarrassed by its use of cluster bombs
[in Lebanon]. It’s no longer possible to justify support for Israel on
conventional and elementary liberal principles — it’s impossible to
justify the occupation.”
A number of surveys suggest that American Jews, especially 20- and 30-year
olds, have grown increasingly distant from Israel, but not necessarily for the
reasons Finkelstein offers.
“It’s claimed that Israel is searching for peace, yet it says to
attack Iran, Syria and Iraq,” Finkelstein continues. “So it’s
an embarrassment. Gradually, American Jewry will be bidding farewell to Israel,
except in existential cases. And the under-40 generation is growing more and more
indifferent” to Israel.
On a drive around his old neighborhood, the discussion turned to his book
“The Holocaust Industry,” which claims Israel is an immoral power
with a horrific human rights record that seeks to evoke sympathy for its
position because of the Holocaust. Finkelstein spoke like a man whom time has
vindicated.
“I don’t know if I’ve pushed the envelope,” he said
of his claims about Jewish groups extorting money from European countries for
Holocaust reparations. “[Famed Holocaust historian Raul] Hilberg
supported me, so I’m not sure how much I’m pushing the envelope.
Before I charged Jewish groups with a shakedown racket, Hilberg did interviews
with the Swiss and German press and said that for the first time in history
American Jews are making use of the blackmail weapon. So they were the ones who
pushed the envelope by using the Holocaust as a blackmail weapon.”
As he reflected on the fate of some of the main figures in the effort to
extract reparations for Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein smiled at the irony of
recent events.
Israel Singer, the former secretary general of the World Jewish Congress,
was fired after it “turned out he had a secret Swiss bank account he was
funneling money to — unbeknownst to the World Jewish Congress — for
what he called his pension,” says Finkelstein.
“Burt Neuborne, the lead counsel in the Swiss case, went around saying
he was doing the work pro bono for his daughter who was studying to be a
rabbi,” he continues. “But it turns out he got $5 million from the
German settlement and was asking for $6 million in the Swiss case. Even the New
York Times wrote an editorial denouncing him. And Mel Weiss [another lawyer in
the case] was indicted [in an unrelated case] and pleaded guilty.”
“They’re all crooks,” Finkelstein says with obvious
satisfaction. “The only one not in trouble is me. I’m unemployed,
but at least I haven’t been indicted.”
Now, settled into his Brooklyn life, Finkelstein is preparing for what may be
his biggest fight, albeit one he doesn’t relish. He plans to go to the
Israeli Consulate in New York in September to seek an assurance that he will be
admitted in December. Such assurance, he said, would allow all concerned to
“avoid the spectacle of me applying under the Law of Return [which gives every
Jew the automatic right to acquire Israeli citizenship]. ... It’s hard to
see which side will find that more ridiculous.
“I don’t incite riots,” he continued. “I’m
just going to see a friend in the occupied Palestinian territories. I’m
not there to see Israel. I do not need for every facet of my life to be
politicized. If Israeli authorities would just grant me a visa, I’ll move
on.”
Finkelstein said he hopes to visit a Palestinian, Musa Abu Hashhash, who
lives with his wife and children near Hebron. They first met in 1988 when
Finkelstein went to Israel with a delegation from the Arab-American
Anti-Discrimination Committee and Finkelstein dedicated one of his books to the
man, who works for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group. He stressed
that his visit to Israel would be a “private” affair and that he
had “no interest in turning this into a political issue. ... I
don’t think they can deny me, and I don’t want to turn it into a
test case for the Israeli High Court.”
As things stand now, however, Norman Finkelstein, the grand provocateur,
waits in limbo for a shot at returning to the Promised Land, a land he has made
a career of reviling.