"The Holocaust Industry" by Norman G. Finkelstein

The reparations issue is the most detailed and troubling section of Finkelstein's short book. Recent reports that $400 million has been paid to U.S. accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen, KPMG and Price Waterhouse, which charged sky-high auditing fees in connection with the international investigation of Swiss banks, lend credence to many of his charges.

On a broader level, Finkelstein is justified in questioning the authenticity of the emotional and other claims staked by Holocaust keepers of the flame. The memory of this singular event has too often been soiled by vulgarity, political calculation, hypocrisy and greed. Former Israeli Foreign Secretary Abba Eban long ago observed: "There's no business like Shoah business." But Finkelstein's swings are so wild and his tone so vitriolic as to raise doubts about his agenda, and even about that which may lie deeper in his heart.

On the issue of reparations, he barely acknowledges the wrongs committed by the Swiss and German institutions -- the burying of Jewish bank accounts, the use of slave labor -- that gave rise to the recent reparations drive. The fear that the reparations will not wind up in the hands of those who need and deserve them most is a legitimate concern. But the idea that survivors have been routinely swindled by Jewish institutions is a gross distortion. The chief reason why survivors have so far seen nothing of the $1.25 billion Swiss settlement, reached in 1998, is that U.S. courts have yet to rule on a method of distribution. On other reparations and compensation settlements, the Claims Conference, a particular bjte noire of Finkelstein, says that it distributed approximately $220 million to individual survivors in 1999 alone.

Other Finkelstein generalizations are as absurd as they are sweeping, and do a great disservice to the serious and enlightening scholarship that has been produced by Holocaust writers over the past 40 years. Thus Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which explains the extermination of the Jews as an outgrowth of purely German anti-Semitism, Finkelstein asserts, is "standard Holocaust dogma," when in fact it has been furiously disputed by other Holocaust historians. "Fragments," the wholly fictitious account of a child survivor by Binjamin Wilkormirski, Finkelstein adds, is "the archetypal Holocaust memoir," ignoring major contributions from survivors such as Primo Levi ("The Drowned and the Saved") and German Jewish observers like Victor Klemperer ("I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years"), both published when the so-called Holocaust industry was supposedly in full flourish.

An ideologue of the left, Finkelstein takes predictable swipes at the "criminal policies of the Israeli state," backed, naturally, by an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. Never mind that U.S. administrations and Jewish interest groups in fact have often been at odds, especially during the Bush administration, Finkelstein insists on seeing "elites" everywhere, notably those of the Jewish persuasion, "marching in lockstep with American power." These elites, the hidden hand of "organized American Jewry" behind the Holocaust industry, have one goal: not the teaching of history but the furthering of "Jewish aggrandizement."

Finkelstein employs such sentiments and language, so associated with standard anti-Semitism, quite freely. Not only might historical anti-Semitism be "grounded in a real conflict of interests" (a classic formulation of Stalinesque leftism), but the Jews, in Finkelstein's view, are often to blame for it. The pursuit of reparations, in another of Finkelstein's wild and baseless charges, "has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe." His assertions become ever more rancid: Israelis and American Jews are nowadays the great oppressors -- "lording it over those least able to defend themselves" -- the former over Palestinians, the latter over American blacks. Holocaust denial is also the fault of the Jews. "Given the nonsense churned out daily by the Holocaust Industry," Finkelstein writes, "the wonder is that there are so few skeptics."

Finkelstein is quick to remind us of his credentials as a child of survivors. Nevertheless his distrust of and distaste for his co-religionists are rather apparent. In a telephone interview with a British publication recently he said: "I'm not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor." Particularly irksome are those "arriviste and shtetl-chauvinist Jews of Eastern European descent like New York City mayor Edward Koch and (former) New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal," whom Finkelstein holds largely responsible for the Holocaust industry and all its foul works.

In the end, Finkelstein acknowledges the "staggering dimensions of Hitler's Final Solution," seeking merely to restore the phenomenon "as a rational subject of inquiry." But what we have here, ultimately, is a rather rancid settling of personal and ideological scores. How that furthers rational inquiry is hard to see. And if truly, as he states at the very end, he wishes for nothing more than for the vanquished to "finally, rest in peace," he might ask himself how his own rage and dogma will help them achieve that.

• View blog reactions