World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein

The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein - one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy - has taught at DePaul for the past six years. His tenure has been overwhelmingly approved at the departmental and college level, but the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has opposed it.

A final decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks. Finkelstein has accused Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of being responsible for leading the effort to deny him tenure. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Dershowitz admitted that he had sent a letter to DePaul faculty members lobbying against Finkelstein’s tenure. Then last week the Wall Street Journal published an article by Dershowitz titled “Finkelstein’s Bigotry.” In it, Dershowitz accuses Finkelstein of being an “anti-Semite” and says that he “does not do ‘scholarship’ in any meaningful sense.”

Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. Today we are joined by two world-renowned scholars in these fields:

* Raul Hilberg. One of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. He is author of the seminal three-volume work “The Destruction of the European Jews” and is considered the founder of Holocaust studies. He joins us on the line from his home in Vermont.

* Avi Shlaim. Professor of international relations at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, most notably “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.” He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict.

LISTEN ONLINE:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/09/1514221