Norman Finkelstein is an influential political scientist, activist, and author. His scholarship has focused on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. Finkelstein’s work has been praised by Raul Hilberg, considered to be the founder of Holocaust studies, Avi Shlaim, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Noam Chomsky, esteemed professor and friend.
Despite this, after a highly publicised feud with Alan Dershowitz (Harvard professor and lawyer to Jeffrey Epstein, amongst others), he was denied tenure in 2007 and was unable to teach for 15 years. Finkelstein publicly dismantled Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel in a debate on Democracy Now!, later turning it into a book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.
He has used his polemical style and forensic scholarly work to savage influential figures and books (as well as Israeli and US foreign policy). As Avi Schlaim noted, “Professor Finkelstein exposed [From Time Immemorial] as a hoax, and he showed how dishonest the scholarship or spurious scholarship was in the entire book. And he paid the price for his courage, and he has been a marked man, in a sense, in America ever since.”1
Professor Finkelstein continued to write books which have been translated into 60 foreign editions, and has now returned to teaching.
— source internationalviews.org | May 27, 2023