Norman Finkelstein

Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist and activist.

His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Finkelstein was born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents.

He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University.

Norman Finkelstein was born on December 8, 1953, in New York City, the son of Harry and Maryla (née Husyt) Finkelstein.

Finkelstein's parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors.

His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp.

His father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz.

After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, and then emigrated to the United States, where his father became a factory worker and his mother a homemaker and later a bookkeeper.

Finkelstein's mother was an ardent pacifist.

Finkelstein completed his undergraduate studies at Binghamton University in New York in 1974, after which he studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1979 in Paris.

He was an ardent Maoist from his teenage years on and was "totally devastated" by the news of the trial of the Gang of Four in 1976, which led him to decide he had been misled.

He was, he says, bedridden for three weeks.

Finkelstein first taught at Rutgers University as an adjunct lecturer in international relations (1977–78), then at Brooklyn College (1988–1991), Hunter College (1992–2001), New York University (1992–2001), and DePaul University (2001–2007).

He received his Master's degree in political science in 1980, and his PhD in political studies from Princeton in 1988.

He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

His doctoral thesis is on Zionism.

Before gaining academic employment, Finkelstein was a part-time social worker with teenage dropouts in New York.

According to Finkelstein, his involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict began in 1982 when he and a handful of other Jews in New York protested against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

He held a sign saying: "This son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Auschwitz, Maijdenek will not be silent: Israeli Nazis – Stop the Holocaust in Lebanon!"

During the First Intifada, he spent every summer from 1988 in the West Bank as a guest of Palestinian families in Hebron and Beit Sahour, where he taught English at a local school.

Finkelstein wrote that the fact that he was Jewish didn't bother most Palestinians: "The typical response was indifference. Word had been passed to the shebab that I was 'okay' and, generally, the matter rested there."

Both his parents died in 1995.

Finkelstein has said of his parents that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on".

They supported the Soviet Union's approval of the creation of the State of Israel, as enunciated by Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, who said that Jews had earned the right to a state, but thought that Israel had sold its soul to the West and "refused to have any truck with it".

Finkelstein grew up in Borough Park, then Mill Basin, both in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School.

In his memoir he recalls strongly identifying with the outrage that his mother, who witnessed the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage the United States wrought in the Vietnam War.

One childhood friend recalls his mother's "emotional investment in left-wing humanitarian causes as bordering on hysteria".

He "internalized [her] indignation", a trait that he admits rendered him "insufferable" when talking about the Vietnam War, and that imbued him with a "holier-than-thou" attitude he now regrets.

But Finkelstein regards his absorption of his mother's outlook—the refusal to put aside a sense of moral outrage in order to get on with one's life—as a virtue.

Subsequently, reading Noam Chomsky played a role in learning to apply the moral passions his mother bequeathed to him with intellectual rigor.

He recounted his experiences of the intifada in his 1996 book The Rise and Fall of Palestine.

Finkelstein rose to prominence in 2000 after writing his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he claims that some exploit the memory of the Holocaust as an "ideological weapon" to provide Israel "immunity to criticism".

He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.

The New York Times reported that Finkelstein left Hunter College in 2001 "after his teaching load and salary were reduced" by the college administration.

In 2006, the department and college committees at DePaul University voted to tenure Finkelstein, but he was not granted tenure, and he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on largely undisclosed terms.

A critic of Israel, he was denied entry to Israel and banned from entering the country for ten years in 2008.

Finkelstein has called Israel the "Jewish supremacist state", and views it as committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Through personal accounts in one of his books, he compares the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation with the horrors of the Nazis.

Finkelstein's latest book on Palestine and Israel is Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.