NORMAN FINKELSTEIN is the academic equivalent of a street fighter. An anti- Zionist crusader and the son of Holocaust survivors, he regularly likens Jewish officials to anti-Semitic stereotypes and has called the Holocaust-survivor writer Elie Wiesel the 'resident clown' of the Holocaust 'circus'. Finkelstein is a far-left academic, with a strong support base among the Holocaust-denying right, who one Jewish intellectual has described as 'poison ... a disgusting self-hating Jew ... something you find under a rock.'
He rose to notoriety in 2000 with The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, which argued that organised Jewry exploits the memory of the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel and blackmail European governments for compensation payments. Finkelstein's tract was initially ignored in the US, but was translated into 17 languages and spent nine months on German best-seller lists. Only after the book created a storm in Europe did mainstream US publications pay heed.
Finkelstein boasts that The New York Times reviewed The Holocaust Industry more savagely than Hitler's Mein Kampf. Writing in its pages, historian Omer Bartov described it as 'an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism ... filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust'.
His new book, Beyond Chutzpah, reprises these themes. Finkelstein says American-Jewish leaders wield the club of anti-Semitism to silence critics of Israel. 'By turning a blind eye to Israeli crimes in the name of sensitivity to past Jewish suffering, [Jewish leaders] enable Israel to continue on a murderous path that foments anti-Semitism,' he writes.
The latter half of the book is given over to a debunking of Harvard scholar and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz's 2004 best-seller The Case For Israel. Finkelstein alleges that Dershowitz's book is a hoax stitched from spurious sources, with vast swathes plagiarised from Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial.
In an academic dogfight that made headlines in the US, Dershowitz launched a fierce campaign to stop Beyond Chutzpah going to press. When his efforts to deter University of California Press from publishing the book failed, he asked Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to intervene. Schwarzenegger refused, saying it was an issue of 'academic freedom'.