In last week’s Worcester Magazine, Clarkies and Worcesterites were advised to boycott an upcoming lecture at Clark University by political science professor Norman G. Finkelstein before we knew who he is or what he was going to talk about.
With all due respect to Mr. Finkelstein’s critics, many people do not shake in revulsion at the sound of his name. True, Mr. Finkelstein’s provocative work, The Holocaust Industry Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering received a damning and somewhat rhetorical review in The New York Times Book Review. (Reviewer Omer Bartov, by the way, was among the scholars criticized in the book.)
But The Holocaust Industry garnered words of praise from The Nation, Salon.com, Times Higher Educational Supplement, the L.A. Times and The Jewish Quarterly. “Finkelstein has raised some important and uncomfortable issues — examples can be breathtaking in their angry accuracy and irony” wrote The Jewish Quarterly. Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, American author and scholar William Quandt, who holds a chair in the department of politics at the University of Virginia, and the late Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg described The Holocaust Industry as “scholarly,” “incisive,” and “thoroughly documented.”
These are hardly the recommendations typically given to an “extremist” or someone whose views are “impermissible” on an American campus.
It is difficult to know the precise nature of Mr. Finkelstein’s sins for the accusations against him come without citations. Is he a Holocaust denier or minimalist as some have claimed? Both of his parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the dedication of his first book, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict reads: “To Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp, and Zacharias Finkelstein, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz concentration camp. May I never forgive or forget what was done to them.” Speaking at the University of Toronto, Nov. 29, 2007, Mr. Finkelstein said, “There is no way I would in any way acquiesce — agree to — remarks, which in any way deny or diminish what happened to Jews during World War II. Were I to do so, in light of my family history, I would have to be clinically insane to make remarks diminishing or denying the Nazi holocaust.”
Is his scholarship shabby? With a Ph.D. from Princeton University, Mr. Finkelstein has published six books in 46 different languages. During his quest for tenure at DePaul University, made public by the bizarre intervention of Harvard law professor and self-described defender of Israel, Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein’s colleagues in the political science department voted 9 to 3 to award tenure and a promotion. The college personnel committee voted unanimously to keep him. Bowing to outside political pressure, the DePaul administration reversed that decision but in a letter announcing denial of tenure described Finkelstein as “a prolific scholar and outstanding teacher.”
His scholarship is “exceptional for its brilliance and rigor,” writes Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, and, like Finkelstein, a child of Holocaust survivors. “In the fields of Middle Eastern Studies and political science, his work is considered seminal and there is no doubt that both disciplines would be intellectually weaker without it.”
John Trumpbour, Research Director of Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, says Finkelstein “has conducted himself with great dignity the various times he has spoken at Harvard. He always allows his opponents plenty of time to criticize him.”
Mr. Finkelstein is concerned with how we remember the past, in this case the Nazi Holocaust, and to what purpose. These are basic questions for any student of history. And yes, of course, they will always be contentious.
“The time is long past to open our hearts to the rest of humanity’s sufferings. This was the main lesson my mother imparted,” he writes in the opening pages of The Holocaust Industry. “I never once heard her say: Do not compare. My mother always compared. No doubt historical distinctions must be made. But to make out moral distinctions between our‚ suffering and theirs‚ is a moral travesty. . .In the face of the sufferings of the African-Americans, Vietnamese, and Palestinians, my mother’s credo was: We are all holocaust victims.”
Mr. Finkelstein is not alone in making these connections. Other children of Holocaust survivors have drawn similar conclusions, including the late Israeli intellectual Tanya Reinhardt and journalist Amira Haas, who writes exposé after exposé about Israeli action in the Occupied Territories because of her mother’s memory of German women watching in silence while Jews were deported to their death.
Mr. Finkelstein’s talk, now scheduled for April 27th will be about the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, an assault made possible by American-made weapons. To plug our ears in the midst of this information would be foolish. I urge everyone to “vote with their feet” and hear Mr. Finkelstein speak. Knowledge is a prerequisite to any just resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. o
