Why Are American Jews Abandoning Israel? Norman Finkelstein Speech (2012)
Norman Gary Finkelstein (born
December 8,
1953) is an
American political scientist, activist, professor and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli--Palestinian conflict and the politics of the
Holocaust, an interest motivated by the experiences of his parents who were
Jewish Holocaust survivors. He is a graduate of
Binghamton University and received his
Ph.D in
Political Science from
Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at
Brooklyn College,
Rutgers University,
Hunter College,
New York University, and, most recently,
DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from
2001 to
2007.
In 2007, after a highly publicized row between Finkelstein and a notable opponent of his,
Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul was denied. Finkelstein was placed on administrative leave for the 2007--2008 academic year, and on
September 5, 2007, he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms. An official statement from DePaul strongly defended the decision to deny Finkelstein tenure, stated that outside influence played no role in the decision.
Finkelstein has written of his
Jewish parents' experiences during
World War II. His mother, Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, grew up in
Warsaw, Poland, survived the
Warsaw Ghetto, the
Majdanek concentration camp, and two slave labor camps. Her first husband died in the war. She considered the day of her liberation as the most horrible day of her life, as she realized that she was alone, her parents and siblings gone.
Norman's father,
Zacharias Finkelstein, was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the
Auschwitz concentration camp.
After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in
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. Both his parents died in
1995.
Finkelstein grew up in
New York City, where he attended
James Madison High School and was a childhood friend of
U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, (
D-NY), who was two years ahead of him. In his forthcoming memoir, Finkelstein recalls his strong youthful identification with the outrage that his mother, witness to the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage wrought by the United States in
Vietnam. One childhood friend recalls his mother's "emotional investment in left-wing humanitarian causes as bordering on hysteria." He had 'internalized (her) indignation', a trait which he admits rendered him 'insufferable' when talking of the
Vietnam War, and which imbued him with a 'holier-than-thou' attitude at the time which 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, his reading of
Noam Chomsky played a seminal role in tailoring the passion bequeathed to him by his mother to the necessity of maintaining intellectual rigor in the pursuit of
the truth.
He completed his undergraduate studies at Binghamton University in
New York in
1974, after which he studied at the
École Pratique des Hautes Études in
Paris. He went on to earn his
Master's degree in political science from Princeton University in
1980, and later his PhD in political studies, also from
Princeton. Finkelstein wrote his doctoral thesis on
Zionism, and it was through this work that he first attracted controversy. Before gaining academic employment, Finkelstein was a part-time social worker with teenage dropouts in New York. He then taught successively at Rutgers University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and Hunter College and, until recently, taught at
DePaul University in Chicago. According to
The New York Times he left Hunter College in 2001 "after his teaching load and salary were reduced" by the college administration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein