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NEW YORK - At 54, Norman Finkelstein is pretty much back where he
started. This summer, the leftist scholarwho made a name for himself in
2000 with his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he called Jewish
leaders a "repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters" intent
on extorting war reparations from European governments lost his job as
assistant professor of political science at DePaul University.
Fortunately, he kept the lease on his late father's threadbare
rent-stabilized apartment, on Ocean Parkway, and there he's retreated.
"It's like death," Finkelstein says. "You keep saying you're going to
die, but you never really come to grips with it. And I can see I'm not
going to get another job. I haven't yet fully absorbed it."
His days are now spent in solitary scholarly pursuits; his bookshelves
buckle under the weight of tomes by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Notes of
support from his students sit on a piano; there's a photo of him and
Noam Chomsky ("my closest friend") bare-chested on the beach at Cape
Cod.
He was a Maoist revolutionary in his youth. By his own account, his
academic career was bedeviled from the start by his politics: It took
him thirteen years to wrest his doctorate from Princeton, since no
faculty member would agree to advise him on his thesis, an analysis of
Zionism. When he finally did earn the degree, none would write him a
recommendation. He went on to take a series of adjunct postsat Brooklyn
College, Hunter, and NYUrarely earning more than $20,000 a year.
At DePaul, where he arrived six years ago, his situation improved. But
the success of The Holocaust Industry, which was translated into over
two dozen languages and was a best seller in Germany, raised his
profile, and the critics mobilized. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz waged a
fierce campaign against him, preparing a dossier of Finkelstein's
"clearest and most egregious instances of dishonesty." Still, his
department, and the college, recommended him for tenure. But the
university's promotion-and-tenure board voted 4-3 against him, and
DePaul's president refused to overturn the decision.
Afterward, Finkelstein says, he lost seventeen pounds. "People saw me
wasting away," he says. A student group held a hunger strike; Chomsky
and others defended him. One of his colleagues made him a mix CD with
tracks like "I Will Survive" and "What's Goin' On?" "I'm an old fan of
the Negro spirituals," Finkelstein says. "I was going around singing to
myself, 'Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there?'
That's how I felt. I was being crucified by the end."
The son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi death camps,
Finkelstein was raised in Borough Park and later Mill Basin, where he
attended high school a few years behind Chuck Schumer. His parents
became atheists after the war.
His new building remains heavily Jewish. A friend of Finkelstein's
father once approached him in the lobby and urged him to tone it down.
"Norman," he told him, "you're getting older, and all the old-age homes
are owned by Jews. If you keep this up, you're not going to have
anywhere to go."
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/41838/
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started. This summer, the leftist scholarwho made a name for himself in
2000 with his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he called Jewish
leaders a "repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters" intent
on extorting war reparations from European governments lost his job as
assistant professor of political science at DePaul University.
Fortunately, he kept the lease on his late father's threadbare
rent-stabilized apartment, on Ocean Parkway, and there he's retreated.
"It's like death," Finkelstein says. "You keep saying you're going to
die, but you never really come to grips with it. And I can see I'm not
going to get another job. I haven't yet fully absorbed it."
His days are now spent in solitary scholarly pursuits; his bookshelves
buckle under the weight of tomes by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Notes of
support from his students sit on a piano; there's a photo of him and
Noam Chomsky ("my closest friend") bare-chested on the beach at Cape
Cod.
He was a Maoist revolutionary in his youth. By his own account, his
academic career was bedeviled from the start by his politics: It took
him thirteen years to wrest his doctorate from Princeton, since no
faculty member would agree to advise him on his thesis, an analysis of
Zionism. When he finally did earn the degree, none would write him a
recommendation. He went on to take a series of adjunct postsat Brooklyn
College, Hunter, and NYUrarely earning more than $20,000 a year.
At DePaul, where he arrived six years ago, his situation improved. But
the success of The Holocaust Industry, which was translated into over
two dozen languages and was a best seller in Germany, raised his
profile, and the critics mobilized. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz waged a
fierce campaign against him, preparing a dossier of Finkelstein's
"clearest and most egregious instances of dishonesty." Still, his
department, and the college, recommended him for tenure. But the
university's promotion-and-tenure board voted 4-3 against him, and
DePaul's president refused to overturn the decision.
Afterward, Finkelstein says, he lost seventeen pounds. "People saw me
wasting away," he says. A student group held a hunger strike; Chomsky
and others defended him. One of his colleagues made him a mix CD with
tracks like "I Will Survive" and "What's Goin' On?" "I'm an old fan of
the Negro spirituals," Finkelstein says. "I was going around singing to
myself, 'Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there?'
That's how I felt. I was being crucified by the end."
The son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi death camps,
Finkelstein was raised in Borough Park and later Mill Basin, where he
attended high school a few years behind Chuck Schumer. His parents
became atheists after the war.
His new building remains heavily Jewish. A friend of Finkelstein's
father once approached him in the lobby and urged him to tone it down.
"Norman," he told him, "you're getting older, and all the old-age homes
are owned by Jews. If you keep this up, you're not going to have
anywhere to go."
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/41838/
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