The Nation.

The Chutzpah Industry

By Jon Wiener

This article appeared in the May 21, 2007 edition of The Nation.

May 2, 2007

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  • Lets try Raul Hilberg as an antidote to the hypocritical Mr. Novick. See this article at democracynow.org.

    And granted, his style is a little different from mine, but I was saying the same thing, and I had published my results in that three-volume work, published in 2003 by Yale University Press, and I did not hear from anybody a critical word about what I said, even though it was the same substantive conclusion that Finkelstein had offered.

    Now Mr. Novick wants us to think he's the sweet voice of reasonableness itself. Earlier he has delivered himself of screeds comparing Finkelstein's well-researched and meticulous arguments to the "Protocols." A sort of last resort of "academics" like Mr. Novick who have their pseudo-scholarship demolished. "Thoughtful"? Surely Mr. Wiener jests.

    Mr. Wiener himself is no great gift to journalism. Else he would have talked to Raul Hilberg, who dwarfs Mr. Novick, on Finkelstein's work. Its a matter of some personal shame to me as a UC alumnus that Mr. Wiener is a professor at UC Irvine.

    Shankar Ramamoorthy

    Albany, CA

    05/20/2007 @ 1:14pm


  • I don't see how Peter Novick's comments are "thoughtful" at all, as Jon Wiener claims.

    Saying that Finkelstein and Dershowitz "deserve each other" is like saying that Batman deserves the Joker. Dershowitz is a fraud who (as The Nation has published) defends torture, plagiarizes, and serves as a mouthpiece for the Israeli military.

    What has Finkelstein done to make him "deserve" Dershowitz? Exposed Dershowitz's fraud and subsequently defended himself against vicious personal attacks by powerful people and organizations.

    Novick's analysis is not "thoughtful" at all, and Wiener does The Nation's readers no service by touting them.

    Greg Pinsky

    New York City, New York

    05/06/2007 @ 1:34pm


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