God bless atheist Norman Finkelstein. I used to think he was too pallid, I wondered about his health. But having been expelled from DePaul and Israel, he looks tan, rested and fit, in this piece and foto in the NY Jewish Week. Says he’s jogging a lot in Sheepshead Bay. Finkelstein bravely agreed to talk to reporter Stewart Ain, who tries to make the scholar look pitiful and fails, seeks to recredit the discredited Joan Peters, and uses Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, to trash Finkelstein. Finkelstein says his new book about Israel losing its grip on American Jews is coming along fine, but no publisher yet. He’ll find one, I’m sure.
It’s too bad about Novick, who wrote a great book. What is it about being marginalized that when the Midnight special of the mainstream media just shines its everlasting light on me for one second, we promptly disassociate ourselves from anyone to the left of us, lest we be marginalized further? We are so desperate to crawl back inside the good graces of conventional wisdom, so we promptly declare, Everyone else out there is a nutjob, not me. Novick got attacked for his book. His tone was a little off. He used terms like the Holocaust sweepstakes, as I remember anyway, and it annoyed Michiko Kakutani. (Oh, it says, “victimization Olympics,” that bugged Kakutani.) But now he has to pee over Finkelstein to get a little street cred in the mainstream community. What happened to intellectual freedom and embracing diverse ideas? Finkelstein is a powerful original thinker whose tone is often too stridently moralistic for me. But he’s done great work, and been censored for it. Just listen to Mearsheimer here, speaking of Finkelstein as a scholar, a citizen of the university, and a teacher. Mearsheimer disagrees with stuff Finkelstein has said. So what. What happened to intellectual fortitude?
