Bøger af Norman Finkelstein

Originating as a response to the 2020 publication of "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" in Harper's, Finkelstein's new book I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It takes aim at both "cancel culture" and "identity politics". Finkelstein delivers a death blow to leftist hypocrisy.

Traditionally, American Jews have been broadly liberal in their political outlook; indeed African-Americans are the only ethnic group more likely to vote Democratic in US elections. Over the past half century, however, attitudes on one topic have stood in sharp contrast to this group's generally progressive stance: support for Israel.Despite Israel's record of militarism, illegal settlements and human rights violations, American Jews have, stretching back to the 1960s, remained largely steadfast supporters of the Jewish "homeland". But, as Norman Finkelstein explains in an elegantly-argued and richly-textured new book, this is now beginning to change.Reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations, and books by commentators as prominent as President Jimmy Carter and as well-respected in the scholarly community as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Peter Beinart, have increasingly pinpointed the fundamental illiberalism of the Israeli state. In the light of these exposes, the support of America Jews for Israel has begun to fray. This erosion has been particularly marked among younger members of the community. A 2010 Brandeis University poll found that only about one quarter of Jews aged under 40 today feel "very much" connected to Israel.In successive chapters that combine Finkelstein's customary meticulous research with polemical brio, Knowing Too Much sets the work of defenders of Israel such as Jeffrey Goldberg, Michael Oren, Dennis Ross and Benny Morris against the historical record, showing their claims to be increasingly tendentious. As growing numbers of American Jews come to see the speciousness of the arguments behind such apologias and recognize Israel's record as simply indefensible, Finkelstein points to the opening of new possibilities for political advancement in a region that for decades has been stuck fast in a gridlock of injustice and suffering.

In the past five years Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014), have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile, a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions.On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological. Senior Israeli politicians have not discouraged such perceptions, indeed they have actively encouraged them. After the 2008-9 assault Israel’s then-foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, boasted, "Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded."However, as Norman G. Finkelstein sets out in this concise, paradigm-shifting new book, a closer examination of Israel's motives reveals a state whose repeated recourse to savage war is far from irrational. Rather, Israel's attacks have been designed to sabotage the possibility of a compromise peace with the Palestinians, even on terms that are favorable to it.Looking also at machinations around the 2009 UN sponsored Goldstone report and Turkey's forlorn attempt to seek redress in the UN for the killing of its citizens in the 2010 attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla, Finkelstein documents how Israel has repeatedly eluded accountability for what are now widely recognized as war crimes.Further, he shows that, though neither side can claim clear victory in these conflicts, the ensuing stalemate remains much more tolerable for Israelis than for the beleaguered citizens of Gaza. A strategy of mass non-violent protest might, he contends, hold more promise for a Palestinian victory than military resistance, however brave.

Widely regarded as one of the major scholar-poets of his generation, Finkelstein has crafted a singular poetics, sensitive to the overlapping traditions of Jewish mysticism, radical poetics and post-modern thought. Taken together, these sources resonate within Finkelstein's body of work as a profound record of human yearning.Both a prequel and a sequel to the earlier FROM THE FILES OF THE IMMANENT FOUNDATION (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and IN A BROKEN STAR (Dos Madres Press, 2021), this new volume of poems is Finkelstein at his most uncanny. A dark, fragmented narrative weirdly illuminated by sudden bursts of lyricism, FURTHER ADVENTURES is a philosophical quest-romance that draws equally from the tradition of visionary poetry and from modern pop culture. At its heart is Pascal Wanderlust, first introduced in BROKEN STAR, who, as Mark Scroggins puts it "traverses waste lands recalling those of Eliot, Browning, and Lovecraft, swims and flies through libraries of Alexandria and Babel, and receives tantalizing hints of destinations in colloquies with specters from beneath the sea, from eldritch dimensions and 'faery lands forlorn.'" A reluctant knight-errant who would rather "sit quietly in a room alone," the young Pascal is charged with the task of restoring the mysterious Immanent Foundation, where "The horns of Elfland and the summons / of the shofar echo throughout the grounds. / Myth calls to counter-myth, song suggests / song, fallen forms rise again...""Follow the ley lines, follow the stars, go down among the lost and the broken. Via psalms, prophecies, chants, invocations, and the whole library of Alexandria, dream by dream, via Love, Art, Mathematics and Magic, verse by verse, stork by crow, electron by anecdote, Le Bateleur of FURTHER ADVENTURES conjures a cosmos, through which Pascal Wanderlust, haunted, double-souled Holy Schlemiel of Tarot and Torah, roves, hopefully, sorrowfully, awkwardly, trippingly, in search of the way home, because, like the secret language hidden in every word we speak, though we are lost in this fiasco we call the world, and in the apocalypse we call the heart, paradise is still spread out over the earth, and the gnostic rover's desire to be elsewhere, if truth be told, is the desire to be truly here, yes, here, where the Zohar unfolds in petals of splendor, and a female form, banded black and gold, hovers on four translucent wings. Her swarm surrounds her, humming hosannas. Onward, then, into the book."--Billie ChernicoffPoetry.

"This is the latest book of critical prose from renowned poet and scholar of Jewish literature Norman Finkelstein. Through a rigorous examination of poets such as William Bronk, Helen Adam, and Nathaniel Mackey, the book engages the contemporary poetic fascination with transcendence through the radical delight with language. By opening up a given poem, Finkelstein seeks the gnosis or insight of what it contains so that other readers can understand and appreciate the works even more"--

Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Poetics. "The wild is always unprecedented, but never inconsistent. This is the knowledge that makesAmerican scholarship American. Norman Finkelstein offers unprecedented insights here whose factsconsist of one Soul purpose: Friendship. Here the imagination of poetry is Friendship on the line. Anddriving that line are energies of the inevitable (if we are to live, Friendship is inevitable): motions outward;an outstretched hand; a goddamn big car bought and paid for lovingly. These energies speak simply, anddoing so, they accomplish new simplicities which Finkelstein boldly proposes as the most radical virtuesof poetic art. Read and see"--from the introduction by Donald Revell.

Wallace Stevens' dark rabbi, from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", provides a title for this work on modern Jewish poetry in English. Norman Finkelstein here offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture-and to American poetry.

Track is a book-length poem, originally released in the USA by Spuyten Divil in three volumes.