Norman Finkelstein was born on December 8, Brooklyn, New York City in 1953 to Holocaust survivors Mary and Zacharias 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 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”.

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.

He attended James Madison High School followed by Binghamton College, where he graduated in 1974 with a degree in History. Finkelstein enrolled at Princeton University where he earned a Master’s degree in political science and a PhD in political studies in 1988. He also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

As a young man, Finkelstein identified as a Maoist and worked for The Guardian, a Maoist newsweekly. After the 1981 trial of the Gang of Four, Finkelstein had a falling out with Maoist politics.

Following this experience, Finkelstein decided to develop his worldview with meticulous scholarship. Finkelstein recounts spending an entire summer in the New York Public Library comparing historical population records of Palestine to the claims made in the Joan Peters Zionist text “From Time Immemorial”.

Finkelstein’s work largely debunked the text, which was well-regarded at the time, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 1985. Finkelstein’s skepticism of scholarship regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict would continue to characterize his academic career.

In 2003, Alan Dershowitz published “The Case for Israel”, which Finkelstein called “a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense”. Dershowitz began campaigning to block Finkelstein’s tenure bid at DePaul University. In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University. In response, Finkelstein resigned, and students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in protest.

In 2008, Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel. In 2009, a documentary film about Finkelstein’s life and career was published, titled “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein”.

“My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies.”

  • Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein - Israel and Palestine israel-cool palestine-heart

An Unpopular Man - Norman Finkelstein, TNR amerikkka

FINKELSTEIN: Misadventures in the Class Struggle - mao-clap

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  • scraeming [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    Can’t believe it every time I see some county passing a raw milk law and acting like it’s some great victory for consumers.

    We spent literal millennia trying to find ways to preserve dairy as a safe, edible source of food, be it cheese, yoghurt, whatever, because milk is SO FUCKING CONTAMINATED WHEN IT’S RAW. Milk spoils so fast that it has to be worked around as part of old-time baking recipes! We’ve used science and industrial infrastructure to make it as safe as possible and that shit still becomes unconsumable like ten days after you buy it, even if you refrigerate it immediately!

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      Yeah. Sucks. People don’t realize how much worse things were, and how little time separates them from that. Pasteurization, biomedicine, mental health treatment, pure food and drug laws. A century ago none of that existed or was just barely coming on line.

      The pure food and drug act happened partially because a bunch of guys volunteered to go around the country, sit in public, and eat all the toxic, adulterated products being sold as food in the us. Then detail just how it made them sick and what the consequences were. And now you can’t sell tinned food preserved with formaldehyde anymore. And most people don’t know.

      • GinAndJuche@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Wiley recruited young men to eat all their meals at a common table as he added increased “doses” of preservatives including borax, benzoate, formaldehyde, sulfites, and salicylates. The table trials captured the nation’s fancy and were soon dubbed “The Poison Squad” by newspapers covering the story. The men soon adopted the motto “Only the Brave dare eat the fare”

        Dudes rock