A Pariah In Exile: Norman Finkelstein - Jewish Week

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A Pariah In Exile: Norman Finkelstein - Jewish Week

Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:15:57 -0400 (EDT) From: IHR News <news@ihr.org>

A Pariah In Exile: Norman Finkelstein                          
The Jewish Week (New York)

http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticl ... _York.html

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.

The family photos in his father's old apartment may be Finkelstein's only comfort, with his career in shambles Michael Datikash

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.