Alan Dershowitz’s Shoddy Scholarship

Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History uses Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel as a backdrop for simultaneously discrediting seemingly everything in Dershowitz’s book while highlighting Israel’s horrific human rights record. In a copiously referenced piece of scholarship, Finkelstein critically examines:

a) the specious nature of the so-called “new anti-Semitism” where it turns out that we are now to believe that anything interpreted as against the interests of Israel be deemed anti-Semitic. No longer is serious, real, enacted hatred of Jews the mark of the anti-Semite. Now the anti-Semite is someone who deigns to disdain the Jew or the interests of Israel - this itself, as Finkelstein shows, being wholely subject to the vagaries and interpretive license of media darlings like Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director Abe Foxman, to declare what is anti-Semitic or who is an anti-Semite.

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