DePaul professor resigns under fire

CHICAGO - In the home of Norman Finkelstein’s youth, talk about a watchful God was not welcome.\nHis parents had been grabbed by the Nazis in Poland during the Holocaust and survived concentration camps, but all their relatives died. And so had Maryla and Zacharias Finkelstein’s belief in God.\nFinkelstein never was the observant Jew his parents were before the war, but he remained connected to the faith they’d lost. And when he saw what he considered some Jewish groups’ exploitation of the Holocaust for political and financial gain, he thought about his parents – and began calling those groups to task.\nOn Wednesday, Finkelstein resigned from his job as a political science professor at DePaul University, months after he was denied tenure at the school where his views and scholarship came under fire.\n“I felt that the memory of my late parents’ suffering was being cheapened by this industry that was reducing their suffering to the moral stature of a Monte Carlo casino,” said the Brooklyn-born Finkelstein.\nBy now, what he did is well known throughout academia and beyond – in large part because of who he took on.\nIn 2000, Finkelstein, a vocal critic of Israel, published “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering .” Not surprisingly, the reaction to the book – in which he claimed Jews in Israel and the United States have used the Holocaust to, among other things, extort money from Germany – was both loud and angry.\nIt got louder when Finkelstein took on famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. After the publication of Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel,” Finkelstein got busy on “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,” an attack both on Dershowitz’s book and an argument that Israel uses the outcry over perceived anti-Semitism as a weapon to stifle criticism.\nEven before the book was published, the two engaged in a bitter war of words – one that included the two men using words like “nut job” and “hoodlum” and “evil’ and “raving maniac” to describe each other. Dershowitz threatened to sue the publisher of the book, as well as urge DePaul not to grant Finkelstein tenure.\nIf it wasn’t surprising that someone as outspoken and opinionated as Dershowitz would engage in such a fight, Finkelstein’s own history was a prelude to this kind of battle as well.\n“I expected I would be a lawyer,” said Finkelstein, 53. “I had a reasonable talent in \nargumentation.”\nBut he saw the practice of law as more of a trade than intellectual discipline and decided to study political science. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Binghamton Collegein New York, he attended Princeton University, where he received his doctorate.\nLike many others in academia, Finkelstein took part-time teaching jobs to pay the bills, but struggled.\n“Most of my life I barely had an income,” he said of years spent teaching courses at various colleges in New York. “I was living on $15,000-$17,000 a year in New York most of my life.”\nThe jobs didn’t pay much, but Finkelstein, who had hoped to spend the bulk of his time doing scholarly research like so many other college professors, found that he liked to teach. By the time he came to DePaul six years ago – his first full-time job – he also knew that he loved teaching college kids.\n“Their ideals are high and they are also able to think through complicated problems about life and have not yet been jaded and haven’t become cynical about the real world, which usually happens when you begin to work,” he said.\nHis regard for the students was clear Wednesday when he heaped praise on them while reading a statement announcing his resignation. On the way to tell students he was leaving – knowing his views make it an almost certainty he will never teach college students again – Finkelstein was asked what he would do now.\nHe paused for a few seconds, before he said, almost in a whisper, “I like to teach.”