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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The son of an Auschwitz survivor accuses the "Holocaust industry," Elie Wiesel and Jewish leaders worldwide of a vast shakedown.
Aug 30, 2000 |
With his clever, explosive and sometimes even wryly funny little book, "The Holocaust Industry," Norman G. Finkelstein, the 47-year-old enfant terrible of Holocaust studies from Brooklyn, N.Y., hit a nerve. Such a big nerve, in fact, that it caused a blackout of virtually all intellectual circuits -- at least in this country.
Finkelstein's main and most devastating charge is that "American Jewish elites" and organizations are extorting billions of dollars from European countries and corporations in the name of "needy Holocaust survivors" in order to fund Holocaust programs, Holocaust memorials, Holocaust studies, Holocaust literature and, in general, "the Jewish community." Together they form not just a cottage industry but a full-fledged "Holocaust industry" sustained by a persistent ideology of "Holocaust correctness" that serves "certain class and political interests." Instead of helping the Jewish cause, Finkelstein goes on to argue, the Holocaust industry has become "the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe" by spreading an image of greedy Jews.
While the book created a firestorm all over Europe, notably in England and Germany, in the U.S. a deafening silence has descended on it. Nobody wants to touch it. Whereas Finkelstein first got mostly negative and later mostly positive reviews in major European newspapers and magazines, and was given various opportunities to debate his adversaries, here he hardly got any reviews (in spite of the 250 review copies he helped his small publisher mail out to critics).
Well, the New York Times did one. It reserved a full page in its Sunday Book Review to compare the book to "The Protocol of the Elders of Zion," a notorious anti-Semitic work, and called its author "indecent," "juvenile," "self-righteous," "arrogant" and "stupid."
"I've looked it up; this review is worse than the one of 'Mein Kampf,'" says Finkelstein, in his high-pitched voice, full of moral indignation.
Finkelstein's theory that the memory of the Nazi Holocaust is being abused for political, moral and financial blackmail could only spring from a deep-rooted anti-Zionism and/or his own personal psychological problems, most American intellectuals silently seem to agree. Not surprisingly, Finkelstein has received death threats from fanatics within the Jewish community and heard Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, say, "Mr. Finkelstein is full of shit" before the nightly television news in Germany.
Finkelstein, educated at Princeton and in Paris but now teaching his "comrades-students" about Marxism and Nazism as an adjunct political science professor at Hunter College in New York, is used to being trashed. In his 1998 essay, "A Nation on Trial," he carefully took apart Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners." When New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier heard about it, he advised Finkelstein's publisher, Michael Naumann of Henry Holt, that the author was "poison, a disgusting self-hating Jew, something you find under a rock."
"I'm thick-skinned; I got that from my parents," Finkelstein says, in his tiny apartment decorated with pictures of his father, who survived Auschwitz, and his mother, who survived Majdanek, on one wall and a poster of Charlie Chaplin on the other. "I try not to lose my sense of humor. When everyone keeps saying you're ugly, first you think they're jealous. But after a while you start thinking that you're really ugly."
Usually there are two sides in a controversy. But it seems you are the only one on yours.
I'm being censured. This is the Holocaust industry at work. Almost everyone I name is a beneficiary of the Holocaust industry. But I bet they feel like the ground beneath them is trembling.
Today I did get some positive feedback, though, from professor Raul Hilberg, an expert on the Holocaust and a conservative Republican at that, so since I am a person of the left, his support cannot be partisan. A Brazilian journalist asked him about my book. Hilberg said Jewish organizations have gone too far with their compensation claims and that they overestimate the number of Holocaust survivors. He calls this form of exploitation obscene. Now, I didn't even use that word.
Your "J'Accuse" -- or rant, depending on your viewpoint -- doesn't only target "corrupt" Jewish organizations like the World Jewish Congress and its leaders, such as billionaire Edgar Bronfman and real estate tycoon Israel Singer. You also attack Elie Wiesel. Why?
Elie Wiesel is such a ridiculous character. In private Elie Wiesel is the subject of much ridicule. The expression "There's no business like Shoah-business" is literally coined for him. So it's not as if I'm the first one to call the emperor naked, but in public -- yes.
Isn't it a cheap shot to attack him on his lecture fee of "$25,000, plus limousine"?
Why is that a cheap shot? He's turned it into a business, where he casts himself as a person who's doing all this from anguish and pain and personal sacrifice, while he has made a fortune out of it. If it were a cheap shot, he wouldn't invest so much in denying it. With a cheap shot he would just have dismissed it. In the U.K. he was asked about it all the time and he was really -- what I would call -- in denial. [Laughs] He always tells people, after referring to his childhood in Buchenwald, that he is living very modestly in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has his books. But of course he forgets to say that such an apartment is costing him thousands of dollars a month.
