O tempora, o mores!
In this excerpt from his new book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!" Finkelstein reflects on his own cancellation. Who turned their backs on him during his moment of trial? Who stood with him?
When my book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering was published in 2000, my small left-wing publishing house, Verso Books, invested a veritable fortune (relative to its shoestring budget) in a publicity package, including a fancy sticker, that was sent to 250 potential reviewers. The book was, at first, almost completely ignored. However, when it unleashed a firestorm in the U.K. (and later in Germany; it was eventually a bestseller in many European countries and was translated into a score of languages), the New York Times ran a review. The reviewer, an Israeli military historian turned Holocaust expert, ridiculed the notion of Holocaust profiteers as “a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’” He then let loose a barrage of invective: “bizarre,” “outrageous,” “paranoid,” “shrill,” “strident,” “indecent,” “juvenile,” “self-righteous,” “arrogant,” “stupid,” “smug,” “fanatic,” and so forth.¹ (In a priceless sequel some months later, this same reviewer did a volte-face, as he railed against the “growing list of Holocaust profiteers,” and put forth as a prime example … “Norman Finkelstein’s ‘The Holocaust Industry.’”)² Out of curiosity, I subsequently dug up the Times review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and, lo and behold, Der Führer fared rather better than me in its pages. Although dismayed by Hitler’s antisemitism, the reviewer did award “this extraordinary man” high marks for “his unification of the Germans, his destruction of Communism, his training of the young, his creation of a Spartan State animated by patriotism, his curbing of parliamentary government, so unsuited to the German character; his protection of the right of private property.”³ It might of course be the case that, even if I wasn’t worse than Hitler (I should hope that I need not argue this point), still, mine was an odious book and I was deserving of the obloquy hurled at me. But was that true? The most incendiary portion of the book argued that American Jewish communal leaders, Jewish public officials and Jewish lawyers (also the occasional Shabbos goy) conspired to blackmail the Swiss banks and then German industry in the name of “needy Holocaust victims.” After the book’s publication and out of the blue, Professor Raul Hilberg, the founder and dean of Holocaust Studies, weighed in on my findings:
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.
I was later informed by Professor Hilberg that Elie Wiesel and the U.S. Holocaust Museum regularly rang him up pleading that he remove his comment, which was reprinted on the back cover of the paperback edition of my book. He refused.⁴
It’s often said that bad publicity is better than no publicity, but that’s not always the case. The Times Book Review in that era was the arbiter of respectable taste. Second-tier newspapers decided which books to review and librarians decided which books to order based on a Times review. Once the word was out that the Times had declared me, my person, beyond the pale—“paranoid,” “fanatic,” later it would be said by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that I was a “Holocaust denier”⁵—my name was no longer mentionable in polite company. Bucking the party line, University of California Press did publish in 2005 my book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history.⁶ A remarkable back story preceded its publication. Debating Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School after release of his national bestseller, The Case for Israel, I alleged on the public affairs program Democracy Now! that he had plagiarized a hoax (indeed, the very hoax I had exposed in 1984); that he had falsified and otherwise mangled his source material; and that every substantive claim in his book, beginning with the author’s name on the cover, was open to question. It became appallingly clear as the debate unfolded that Dershowitz was ignorant of the book’s content. After playfully needling him about “his” book’s authorship, I finally got him to take the bait:
FINKELSTEIN: I read your book. Or the book you purport to have written.
DERSHOWITZ: Now you claim somebody else wrote it?
FINKELSTEIN: I hope so. For your sake I truly hope you did not write this book.
DERSHOWITZ: I proudly wrote it.
FINKELSTEIN: I think the honorable thing for you to do would be to say I didn’t write the book, I had no time to read it, I’m sorry.
Dershowitz would later allege that he had been “ambushed” on the program. Truth be told, he did have a point: Was it fair that only one of us had read “his” book? I then proceeded to fully document his scholarly crimes and misdemeanors in Beyond Chutzpah. When Dershowitz got wind of the book, he prodded California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to block its publication. But the governor refused to “exert influence in this case because of the clear, academic freedom issue it presents.”⁷ Dershowitz next threatened via his lawyer to bankrupt UC Press: “your appendix—if it is not removed before publication—is going to lead to painful surgery for the Press.” (The book’s appendix exposed Dershowitz’s plagiarism.)⁸ It might be expected that, when the senior-most professor of the most prestigious law school in the U.S., who is also avaunted First Amendment civil libertarian, goes to extraordinary lengths in order to suppress publication of a book that documents his multitudinous breaches of scholarly protocol, the occasion of the book’s publication by a respected publishing house would have piqued many a reviewer’s curiosity. In fact, it was barely noticed. One would have to be blinder than King Lear not to see that I had now graduated to being officially cancelled, a non-person.
The sad and sorry tale here retold, however, does not yet present a complete picture. I have not fared any better in leftist venues. The flagship publication of the political left back in my day was The Nation magazine. I was effectively banned from its pages the whole of my public life. Almost without exception, every piece of writing I submitted to The Nation the past 40 years has been summarily rejected, and it has not reviewed a book by me in decades.⁹ It was an irony I somehow savored that The Nation, which, as a matter of editorial pride, had defined itself in opposition to the McCarthyite blacklist, notwithstanding blacklisted me. During my tenure debacle at DePaul University in 2007, The Nation weighed in by seconding the opinion that Professor Dershowitz’s scholarship and my own were of a piece: “such people [i.e., Dershowitz and myself] are often inclined to stretch evidence to the breaking point, and occasionally beyond.”¹⁰ Earlier, the political editor of The Progressive, Ruth Conniff, declared on Wisconsin Public Radio that I was a “Holocaust minimizer.” The chief editor and publisher of The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild, defended Conniff’s defamation: didn’t I cite the figure of 5.1 million Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust?¹¹ But that figure comes from Raul Hilberg’s authoritative study, The Destruction of the European Jews. While my “comrades” on the left sedulously sabotaged my tenure bid, Hilberg, a conservative Republican, came out firmly in my defense.¹² Based on my own experience and what I’ve witnessed a few degrees removed, it is my considered opinion that leftists aren’t any more beholden to Truth and Justice as a point of personal ethic than those situated at other calibrations along the political spectrum. Because its ideology is formally committed to reason, on the one hand, and the underdog, on the other, the political left is, if not in perfect sync, still, not inherently at loggerheads with Truth and Justice. But the left is just as infected by elitism and racism, just as riddled by cliques and cabals, just as given to power-plays and back-scratching, and just as ruthless and aggrandizing as the political center or right. Presenting an abundance of evidence, I charged in The Holocaust Industry that Burt Neuborne, former National Legal Director of the A.C.L.U., was a Holocaust huckster. While piously proclaiming that he had represented “needy Holocaust victims” pro bono in memory of his deceased daughter, Neuborne raked in a cool $8 million plus. The editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky, immediately chimed in to defend Neuborne.¹³ When a fellow member of the left nomenklatura was called to account for his misdeeds, Navasky proved to be as beholden to Truth and Justice as to yesterday’s toast. A dear friend, who’s a non-ideological liberal, once passed on some sage advice that has stayed with me: character is a much better gauge than ideology of a person’s virtue. I have never been on a mainstream national radio or television program. Brian Lehrer, who moderates a public affairs program on the local New York affiliate of hyper-woke National Public Radio (N.P.R.) had me on for ten minutes 30 years ago. The target audience of N.P.R.’s inclusive New York affiliate embraces a broad swathe of the city: Lehrer’s listener-base is Upper West Side Jewish millionaires, while Leonard Lopate (before he was unceremoniously canned for sexual harassment) spoke to and for Upper East Side Jewish billionaires. That leaves out only a little over eight million New Yorkers. The fact is, both producers were redundant. Although I haven’t tuned into either Lehrer or Lopate in decades, still, I know verbatim what they had to say on every conceivable occasion—they love Obama, and Michelle even more, they mourn John Lewis’ passing, they hate Trump, they support Black Lives Matter except, maybe, the violence and, oh—did I forget to mention?—they really love Obama and Michelle. Were N.P.R. ever forced to retrench, its programming could easily be replaced by a woke algorithm with no discernible human loss. After those less-than-15 minutes of fame, N.P.R. cancelled me, not, to be sure, for anything I said, but for what they dreaded I might say, were I on another time. In 2018, University of California Press published my magnum opus, Gaza: An inquest into its martyrdom. In his blurb for the book, John Dugard, a distinguished authority on international law who was also the U.N. Special Rapporteur in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, described me as “probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East.” By the most fortuitous of coincidences, my book was published just as the Great March of Return began in Gaza. It was perfect timing, one might have thought. My publisher sent out 300 review copies. It was reviewed in exactly two venues—a small Palestinian scholarly journal, and a small “pro-Arab” policy journal, where Professor
Chomsky wrote, “In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein’s study stands alone.”¹⁴
Am I just another failed academic whining, “I could’ve been a contender”? Perhaps. But maybe, just maybe, I have been a casualty of cancel culture. Consider this paradoxical piece of evidence. Notwithstanding my serial cancellations, in 2020 I was ranked the fifth most influential political scientist in the world for the years 2000-2020, just behind John Mearsheimer and ahead of Francis Fukuyama, Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Putnam, and Cass Sunstein.¹⁵ I initially assumed it was a practical joke, but my skepticism was dispelled as a physicist who was party to the project vouched that the ranking was based on a sophisticated algorithm. It was a bittersweet moment of belated recognition. Even allowing for the margin of error, I was a known quantity, not just on account of my public notoriety but also my professional distinction. At an early age I had vowed, after Marx, not to let bourgeois society turn me into a “money-making machine.” Like Paul Robeson, I did not “retreat one thousandth part of one inch.” I stayed true to the values that animated me in the sweetness and hope of my youth. And, it would appear, I wasn’t bowed or defeated. I was cancelled, yes; but I wasn’t silenced. How I managed to pull this off, I can only speculate. Under the aegis of campus Palestine solidarity groups, I was able to speak at scores of colleges and universities across the United States and abroad.¹⁶
Taking advantage of these occasions to report my latest research findings, I would deliver fact-filled talks that lasted more than two hours. The announcement that I was scheduled to speak invariably evoked outrage from the campus Hillel and allied Israel front organizations. The administration would come under terrific pressure to cancel me. Op-eds and letters to the editor would pour into the school newspaper denouncing me as a “Holocaust denier,” “supporter of terrorism,” etc., while Jewish alumni would threaten to withhold their financial contributions. These strong-arm tactics did occasionally cause the school to capitulate (once, I got so fed up that I threatened a lawsuit, and the University of Pittsburgh agreed to a private settlement). But usually the event went off as planned, while pro-Israel groups would typically form a silent candlelight vigil as if in mourning (that I was still alive?) outside the venue. Inside, an overflow crowd would turn up, curiosity piqued at the object of the orchestrated hysteria. It was easy as pie to win over the audience: after being reviled as the Devil incarnate, all I needed do was saunter on stage without horns and pitchfork. The event was usually videotaped and later posted on YouTube. In my early years of lecturing, a long queue would form after my talk and virtually every person in line would begin by saying: “Professor Finkelstein, I’ve read all your books.” But during the past decade, I’m invariably told, “Professor Finkelstein, I’ve watched all your videos on YouTube.” O tempora, o mores! In any event, the frenetic undertakings to cancel me would appear to have backfired, as I was able to reach a much bigger audience as a result of the demonization campaign. However, because of the troubles brought upon the school and sponsoring student groups, the prospect of a return invitation was remote, so these contrived hysterics by Israel’s front organizations did, in the long run, pay off for them. It should also be said that, although the “free publicity” did help, it is my opinion that if I did achieve a measure of success (if that’s the right word), it was because I was at great pains to do my homework beforehand; I was fair and respectful in the proceedings (I would insist that, after my talk, dissenters in the audience be allowed to interrogate me first); I did have something of substance to say and was sufficiently in command of the facts that I rarely faltered in debate; audiences respected that I was willing to pay a steep personal price in defense of my beliefs; and ultimately, if I triumphed (again, if that’s the right word), it was because the case I was making was true, the cause I was advocating just.¹⁷
Omer Bartov, “A Tale of Two Holocausts,” New York Times Book Review (6
August 2000).Omer Bartov, “Did Punch Cards Fuel the Holocaust?,” Newsday (24 March
2001).James W. Gerard, “A Hymn of Hate,” New York Times (15 October 1933;
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1996/10/06/631345.html?pageNumber=NaN).This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Professor Hilberg came to my rescue. In 1996, Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which became an instant national bestseller and catapulted its author to academic superstardom. It was Goldhagen’s thesis that “the central causal agent of the Holocaust” was the German people’s deeply entrenched homicidal hatred of Jews. I published a long critical essay, later republished in a coauthored book, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn), demonstrating that Goldhagen’s scholarship was shoddy and his logic contorted. Hilberg (who deemed Goldhagen’s tome “worthless”), alongside many leading lights in Holocaust Studies and the historical profession, such as Christopher Browning, Ian Kershaw, Eric Hobsbawm and Arno Mayer, endorsed A Nation on Trial. The Holocaust industry was none too pleased that a book coauthored by me garnered such prestigious backing. In order to neutralize this inconvenient fact, a review in Slate magazine brazenly alleged that the blurbs by Hilberg et al. “appear to be more the expressions of well-wishers than of close readers.” I was privately informed that this hit-job had been ordered by an editor at Slate, Judith Shulevitz, who is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times.
https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/how-the-adl-fights-anti-semitism/
The back cover was graced with glowing endorsements from leading scholars, such as Sara Roy of Harvard, Avi Shlaim of Oxford, and Baruch Kimmerling of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Jon Wiener, “Giving Chutzpah New Meaning,” The Nation (11 July 2005).
The paperback version of Beyond Chutzpah (2008) contained a lengthy Epilogue by Frank J. Menetrez (“Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who’s right and who’s wrong?”) independently corroborating the plagiarism charge. Menetrez currently serves as an Associate Justice on the California Court of Appeal. For the “painful surgery” quote, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20081207134842/http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1287
It posted (but didn’t include in its print edition) an article I coauthored with two other writers in 2015, and it published a brief commentary by me in 2016.
Jon Wiener, “The Chutzpah Industry,” The Nation (2 May 2007). My former personal editor, who was long established at The Nation and so could have vouched on my behalf that these were damnable lies, prudently left me out to dry. Back in the day, Leon Trotsky seethed after being traduced by them, “what an infamous reptile breed these radicals of The Nation!” (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-1940 (New York: 1977), p. 292)
Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history, updated paperback edition with a new preface (Berkeley: 2008), p. xxxix n84.
See Conclusion to Part II of Norman G. Finkelstein, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (Sublation Media: 2023)
The Nation, “In Fact…” (24 January 2002). Neuborne put in for an additional $1 million in legal fees for his “pro bono” labors, but after extensive litigation it was denied him. In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litig, United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (6 December 2007). In a bewildering personal footnote to this vampire diary, Neuborne’s attorney in the legal fees litigation was Samuel Issacharoff, currently a law professor at N.Y.U. I was a close friend of Sam’s in college when he was a member of the lunatic Trotskyist sect known as the Spartacists. (He would later head up the Spartacist Youth League.) Comrade Sam was given back then to denouncing everyone else on the Left, including yours truly (a mere Maoist), as petty bourgeois. A half century later, this once-upon-a-time Trotsky wannabe had metamorphosed into a Holocaust-huckster-one-step-removed, as he collected his attorney fees from Lead Vampire Counsel Burt Neuborne, who paid out Sam from his own attorney fees, that in turn were deducted from the monies earmarked for “needy Holocaust victims.” Was this Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” or permanent devolution?
Middle East Policy (19 September 2018).
https://academicinfluence.com/search?query=norman+finkelstein Wikipedia’s list of James Madison High School’s “notable alumni” includes Senators Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and Norm Coleman; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and “Judge Judy”; Nobel laureates Arthur Ashkin, Gary Becker, Stanley Cohen, Martin Lewis Perl, and Robert Solow; and “Norman Finkelstein (born 1953) political scientist, activist, professor, author.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison_High_School_(Brooklyn)
My standard speaking fee was: “Do the best you can, keeping in mind that I am permanently unemployed.” I was usually paid $500-1,000, sometimes a little more, sometimes zero. The standard honorarium of a leftist “superstar” is around $20,000. Once, while I was on a speaking tour in Kerala, India, the local activist group sponsoring me and operating on a pauper’s budget expressed astonishment, as it brought up her email on a computer screen, that Naomi Klein had demanded nothing less than $25,000 plus a round-trip first-class airline ticket.
Having criticized the cult-like Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, I am also no longer called upon to speak by Palestine solidarity groups.