Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is currently an independent scholar. Finkelstein is the author of five books which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions:
Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press, 2005; expanded paperback edition, 2008)
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso, 2000; expanded paperback edition, 2003)
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995; expanded paperback edition, 2003)
A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn) (Henry Holt, 1998)
The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (University of Minnesota, 1996) He has just completed a new book entitled
A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism, to be published in 2009. <source: >
official website Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and author, whose primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. A graduate of SUNY Binghamton, he 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.
Amidst considerable public debate, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul in June 2007, and placed on administrative leave for the 2007-2008 academic year. Among the controversial aspects of this decision were attempts by Alan Dershowitz, a notable opponent of Finkelstein's, to derail Finkelstein's tenure bid. On September 5, 2007 Finkelstein 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, and asserted that outside influence played no role in their decision. The statement also praised Finkelstein "as a prolific scholar and outstanding teacher."
Finkelstein has written of his parents' experiences during World War II.
His mother, Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, grew up in Warsaw, Poland, and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, as well as 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, since it first struck her then that she was alone, none of her parents and siblings having managed to survive.
Norman's father, Zacharias Finkelstein, was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp. American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein is a 2009 documentary film about the life of the American academic, directed and produced by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. The documentary features Finkelstein and several of his supporters and opponents, including Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz. <source: >
Wikipedia
