Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein teaches at the City University of New York and is the author of The Holocaust Industry.

The Holocaust is more central to American cultural life than the Civil War. Seventeen states either demand or recommend Holocaust programmes in their schools; many colleges and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies; hardly a day goes by without a Holocaust-related story appearing in the New York Times. Polls show that many more Americans can identify the Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan. Consider the media attention given to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, published in 1996 and hailed as Time’s ‘most talked about’ book of the year. It has become an international bestseller and its author has become a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.‘

Letter

Ordinary Monsters

23 January 1997

Peter Pulzer offers guarded praise to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners for raising ‘important and, to some extent, new questions’. The truth is that it is the most pernicious rubbish ever written on the Nazi phenomenon. The one and only question raised is the state of an intellectual culture that takes such ineffable nonsense seriously. Goldhagen argues that fanatical anti-semitism...

Inhumane, Intolerant, Unclean

Ian Gilmour, 31 October 1996

What exactly is a ‘holy city’ or, for that matter, a ‘holy see’? If Jerusalem is the prime example of the first and Rome the only example of the second, their holiness...

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