Product Description

In this long-awaited sequel to Norman Finkelstein's bestselling "The Holocaust Industry" - Finkelstein lays into the human rights record of Israel and attacks Alan Dershowitz for poor scholarship. In "Beyond Chutzpah", Norman Finkelstein moves from an iconoclastic interrogation of the new anti-Semitism to a meticulously researched expose of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Pointing to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record, Finkelstein argues that so much controversy continues to swirl around the conflict because apologists for Israel contrive it. Examining the spread of distortions masquerading as history, Finkelstein scrutinizes the most recent addition to this genre, Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel" and, setting Dershowitz's assertions on Israel's human rights record against the findings of the mainstream human rights community, finds that Dershowitz has systematically misrepresented the facts. Thoroughly researched and tightly argued, "Beyond Chutzpah" lifts the veil of contrived controversy shrouding the Israel-Palestine conflict, enabling readers in search of a just and lasting peace to act on the basis of truth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57592 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 356 pages

Review
"His research is painstaking, his evidence persuasive and his conclusions devastating." - London Review of Books "A very solid, important and highly informative book. Norman Finkelstein provides extensive details and analysis, with considerable historical depth and expert research, of a very wide range of issues concerning Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States." - Noam Chomsky"

About the Author
Norman G. Finkelstein teaches political science at DePaul University, Chicago. His books include The Holocaust Industry; A Nation on Trial (with Ruth Bettina Birn); and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Customer Reviews

A very fine book
Norman Finkelstein is controversial. Look at the review ratings for this book, on this site in the middle of November 2008 - ten reviews, with eight of them being five- or four-star, and two being one-star. You can't be indifferent about the guy. He is bullish, angry, abrasive and confrontational, very much like the man who is his chief antagonist in this book: Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. These two were destined to end up in a head-to-head match and it finally happens within the pages of "Beyond Chutzpah", the very title of which is a sardonic nod at Dershowitz's own book "Chutzpah". Readers who have no Yiddish may be forgiven for thinking that "chutzpah" means simply "bravery". It also has connotations of "nerve", "cheekiness" and even "impudence". Finkelstein has clearly run out of patience with what he sees as Dershowitz's chutzpah.

Living as I do in Ireland, and being an atheist gentile with a merely scholarly interest in Judaism, I would point out to Mr. Finkelstein that his scepticism about Irish antisemitism is not entirely well-founded. "Jew" was still a term of abuse among kids when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. Fairly recently, within the last few years, I witnessed a well-known Irish actor making crudely antisemitic remarks in a Dublin bar; I called him on them, and only narrowly avoided having him kick my head in (his friends ushered him out before he could cause any trouble).

Nevertheless, any book that carries endorsements from Israeli academics such as Baruch Kimmerling and Avi Shlaim surely ought to have something to it. The genius of Norman Finkelstein is that his method is completely transparent; like Chomsky's, it is nothing but scholarship, in that he compares one document to another and points out consistencies and, where they are obvious, inconsistencies. As he says himself, it is not very difficult to demonstrate that Alan Dershowitz has consistently misquoted sources, used other people's sources without citing them, twisted statements made by his enemies, etc. etc. Finkelstein demonstrates the fact, over and over again. The hard bit is getting anyone to take notice. The unexpected pleasure of this book is Finkelstein's exhaustive demonstration of the depths to which Alan Dershowitz will sink in order to win a fight. Finkelstein has elsewhere succeeded in utterly discrediting Joan Peters' infamous book "From Time Immemorial": here, he shows that Dershowitz not only quotes whole chunks of guff from that book without giving it credit, he often didn't even bother to do it himself, but got his research assistants to do it for him. I find it hard to believe that Dershowitz's reputation as an honest commentator can long survive an onslaught such as this. And yet all Finkelstein has done is point out the extent to which Dershowitz's remarks simply fail to correspond to documented reality.

Yes, Finkelstein can be rude and obnoxious. His website in particular is littered with heavy-handed sarcasm and clunking polemic, but then he has been repeatedly penalised for simply attempting to tell the truth, whereas Dershowitz has risen to the heights of US academia whilst being, all along, a shameless apologist for disgusting brutality and hypocrisy. Finkelstein, for all his bad temper and inability to be serene about his situation, is simply and inconveniently in the right. He may be an embarrassing person to have on one's side, but the likes of Dershowitz, on the evidence that this book supplies in such careful and meticulous detail, are morally repugnant.

The moral nadir of the book is Dershowitz's shameless attempt to claim that Finkelstein thought that his own mother - a concentration camp survivor - had been a camp "Kapo", based on a blatant misreading of a passage in Finkelstein's own memoir. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? It would take a better man than me to forgive Dershowitz for something like that.

An excellent book
with expansive footnotes and well documented sources. Its strange how a book that relies on some of the most respected human rights groups for its information can get someone in so much trouble. I wish his detractors would (or even could) attack his sources instead of his character - then it would be even more obvious how detached from reality they are.

Quite simply a PRICELESS piece of scholastic brilliance
Finkelstein is a man motivated above all else by the need to find truth and honesty. In this work - perhaps his best - he debunks the lies and fabrication of leading Zionists and their pitiful use of the Shoah to brook no real examination of the murderous policies of the Israeli state.
The real gem of this work is how Finkelstein lays bare the lies and fabrication of Alan Dershowitz in that man's travesty of a book 'The Case for Israel'.
Finkelstein is a man who, from his earliest days as a Princeton graduate student in the early 1980s, put integrity and truth above his own career. Precisely, when he pushed and pushed to get a hearing for his research that showed that Joan Peter's book 'From Time Immemorial' was a complete fabrication. He knew that, and showed that by corresponding with every journal in the US that reviewed that book ('outstanding', 'brilliant', 'seminal work'), only for them to ignore him. Only when it was published here in the UK, where the Zionists have no such control, was his research read by scholars here, and that book - that suggested Palestine was in fact 'unpopulated' until the 1948 wars - was discarded as the worst kind of fraud. That one act, piece of work, by Finkelstein sealed his future fate. Immediately after, no single Academic at Princeton would ever agree to meet him again - he was completely shunned. In fact, Princeton granted him a Phd with NO supervision and out of 'embarrassment'.
This man has virtually sacrificed any chance of a 'tenured' Academic career in the US (8 June 2007 DePaul University, Chicago refuses his application for tenure, despite 17 out of 24 committee professors voting in his favour, as a result of a 'jihad' against him by Alan Dershowitz, the plagiariser and fabricator)and it is to be hoped he will be given the chance to teach students here in the UK or Europe generally.