The “worst enemies in the struggle against real anti-Semitism are the philo-Semites,” writes DePaul University political science professor Norman Finkelstein in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, scheduled to hit bookstores on August 29. “Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They need to be stopped.” Philo-Semites, he says, are American Jewish elites who use the Holocaust and the charge of anti-Semitism to silence any criticism of Israel or themselves, and at the top of the list he puts Harvard professor and author Alan Dershowitz.
Finkelstein wasn’t about to let him rest. In Beyond Chutzpah–the title’s a reference to Dershowitz’s 1991 book Chutzpah–he charges that Dershowitz quoted without attribution from Joan Peters’s 1984 book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. Finkelstein had read Peters’s book carefully, combing through the footnotes in an effort to challenge her sources and undermine her thesis that Palestine was practically unpopulated when Jews began moving there and that most of the Arabs who fled in 1948 were themselves recent arrivals. The use of “fraudulent history” to cover up Israeli “crimes” is one of his favorite themes, and in Beyond Chutzpah he writes that Peters’s book is a “colossal hoax.”
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But his work also has been endorsed by Raul Hilberg, dean of the Holocaust historians. And though he’s been called a Holocaust denier, both of his parents were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps, and the rest of his family died in the Holocaust. He grew up during the 60s in Brooklyn, where photographs of dead relatives hung in the living room. His father rarely discussed his experience, his mother readily talked of hers. The Holocaust colored their perception of the world. “They didn’t trust anyone,” Finkelstein says. “They were great humanitarians, they loved people. But they were–it’s like that saying, ‘He’s a great philanthropist, but he can’t stand his neighbors.’ They were like that.” It infuriates him that anyone would try to use their experience or the experience of people like them to rationalize unethical acts. “I will not have the suffering of my parents used for any ulterior purpose,” he told the London Sunday Times in 2000, “whether it be the prevention of the assimilation of Jews or the defense of Israel.”
Hoping to get his book into print sooner, Finkelstein switched to the University of California Press. But they too seemed worried about a lawsuit and insisted that his manuscript be pored over by four lawyers–only two had read his previous books. “I was involved in a process which had basically been taken over by lawyers–where the university press was, I think it’s fair to say, shoved aside–and it was now the lawyers who were calling the shots,” he says. “They were making all sorts of demands on me and all sorts of decisions, which I found unacceptable, about which I had very little negotiating space.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Rick Friedman–Corbis, Charles Eshelman.
