Norman Finkelstein: Will he get tenure?
The new academic school year is well underway. But there is one school in which this year will determine once and for all whether it will henceforth be considered to be a bona fide “university”, or merely a make-pretend parody of one.
That institution is DePaul University.
This year will witness the most important decision in DePaul’s entire history, ever since it was first founded by the Catholic “Vincentians”. Over the next few months, DePaul will be deciding whether or not to grant Norman Finkelstein tenure on the basis of his “record”. The same university that fired Prof. Thomas Klocek for daring to defend Israel in a campus conversation outside the classroom is now seriously considering granting tenure to Finkelstein on the basis of his hate-filled pseudo-scholarly screeds. At DePaul, Finkelstein serves as assistant professor of political science at DePaul, but scholarship is the last thing that occupies his time.
Before coming to DePaul he had been fired from several adjunct jobs at academic institutions in the New York area for his lack of serious academic credentials and scholarship. Virtually Finkelstein’s entire publication record consists of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel books and non-professional articles. He has no publications whatsoever in any refereed academic journals, although he has hundreds in anti-Semitic, Holocaust Denial, and neo-nazi web magazines. The closest Finkelstein ever got to journal publication was with a couple of propaganda pieces in New Politics, a “socialist” non-academic magazine of far-leftist agitprop, sponsored by – among others – Noam Chomsky. This “journal” openly states that it “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action.” Finkelstein also writes in assorted pro-terror Palestinian “journals”.
Finkelstein’s “books” have been dismissed as scholarly frauds and hate-filled propaganda by just about every serious historian or other scholar who has reviewed them. In the New York Times, Prof. Omer Bartov (Brown University historian) described Finkelstein’s book on the Holocaust as a “novel variation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the fraudulent essay concocted in the late nineteenth century by the Czarist secret police. He also described Finkelstein as “juvenile,” “arrogant,” and “stupid” (Aug. 6, 2000). Professor Marc Saperstein described Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history as a “prolonged diatribe,” replete with “outrageous ad hominem attacks” and written in the “rhetorical style of the arrogant academic pit bull.”
The eminent historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has dismissed Finkelstein as an anti-Semitic crackpot, as a pseudo-scholar, and as an apologist for the Hamas terrorists. The historian Israel Guttman dismissed Finkelstein’s book as an anti-Semitic buffoon. Professor Hans Momsen from Germany described it as “a most trivial book, one that appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices.” University of Chicago Professor and author Peter Novick dismisses Finkelstein’s writing as “trash”. Novick has written,
“Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention… No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate.” [1]
He adds,
“I had not thought that (apart from the disreputable fringe) there were Germans who would take seriously this twenty-first century updating of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ I was mistaken.” (Offene Fenster und Tueren,’Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 7, 2001)
The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly characterized Finkelstein as an open Holocaust Denier. So has the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The French group “Avocats Sans Frontieres“ (Lawyers without Borders) filed a suit in a French court against Finkelstein and his publisher two years back for libel and Holocaust Denial. Finkelstein readily adopts the language of neo-nazis; his web site a few days ago described a meeting of pro-Israel Jews in Europe as an assembly of the “Elders of Zion”. His personal web site recently carried a banner heading asserting that the Jews themselves fabricated photos of the murdered at Auschwitz..
“The field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud,”
writes Finkelstein. Among his most famous pronouncements is,
“If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one,” my mother used to exclaim, “who did Hitler kill?” (Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, London 2000). ....
Read entire article at Steven Plaut in The American Thinker
That institution is DePaul University.
This year will witness the most important decision in DePaul’s entire history, ever since it was first founded by the Catholic “Vincentians”. Over the next few months, DePaul will be deciding whether or not to grant Norman Finkelstein tenure on the basis of his “record”. The same university that fired Prof. Thomas Klocek for daring to defend Israel in a campus conversation outside the classroom is now seriously considering granting tenure to Finkelstein on the basis of his hate-filled pseudo-scholarly screeds. At DePaul, Finkelstein serves as assistant professor of political science at DePaul, but scholarship is the last thing that occupies his time.
Before coming to DePaul he had been fired from several adjunct jobs at academic institutions in the New York area for his lack of serious academic credentials and scholarship. Virtually Finkelstein’s entire publication record consists of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel books and non-professional articles. He has no publications whatsoever in any refereed academic journals, although he has hundreds in anti-Semitic, Holocaust Denial, and neo-nazi web magazines. The closest Finkelstein ever got to journal publication was with a couple of propaganda pieces in New Politics, a “socialist” non-academic magazine of far-leftist agitprop, sponsored by – among others – Noam Chomsky. This “journal” openly states that it “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action.” Finkelstein also writes in assorted pro-terror Palestinian “journals”.
Finkelstein’s “books” have been dismissed as scholarly frauds and hate-filled propaganda by just about every serious historian or other scholar who has reviewed them. In the New York Times, Prof. Omer Bartov (Brown University historian) described Finkelstein’s book on the Holocaust as a “novel variation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the fraudulent essay concocted in the late nineteenth century by the Czarist secret police. He also described Finkelstein as “juvenile,” “arrogant,” and “stupid” (Aug. 6, 2000). Professor Marc Saperstein described Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history as a “prolonged diatribe,” replete with “outrageous ad hominem attacks” and written in the “rhetorical style of the arrogant academic pit bull.”
The eminent historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has dismissed Finkelstein as an anti-Semitic crackpot, as a pseudo-scholar, and as an apologist for the Hamas terrorists. The historian Israel Guttman dismissed Finkelstein’s book as an anti-Semitic buffoon. Professor Hans Momsen from Germany described it as “a most trivial book, one that appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices.” University of Chicago Professor and author Peter Novick dismisses Finkelstein’s writing as “trash”. Novick has written,
“Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention… No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate.” [1]
He adds,
“I had not thought that (apart from the disreputable fringe) there were Germans who would take seriously this twenty-first century updating of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ I was mistaken.” (Offene Fenster und Tueren,’Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 7, 2001)
The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly characterized Finkelstein as an open Holocaust Denier. So has the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The French group “Avocats Sans Frontieres“ (Lawyers without Borders) filed a suit in a French court against Finkelstein and his publisher two years back for libel and Holocaust Denial. Finkelstein readily adopts the language of neo-nazis; his web site a few days ago described a meeting of pro-Israel Jews in Europe as an assembly of the “Elders of Zion”. His personal web site recently carried a banner heading asserting that the Jews themselves fabricated photos of the murdered at Auschwitz..
“The field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud,”
writes Finkelstein. Among his most famous pronouncements is,
“If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one,” my mother used to exclaim, “who did Hitler kill?” (Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, London 2000). ....