Dershowitz vs. Finklestein

The Chronicle of Higher Education

"The highly public feud between Norman G. Finkelstein of DePaul University and Harvard Law School's Alan M. Dershowitz has taken an unusual procedural twist, with Mr. Dershowitz attempting to weigh in on Mr. Finkelstein's bid for tenure at DePaul.

"How Mr. Dershowitz's move will play out remains to be seen. Mr. Finkelstein's department supported his tenure bid, but the dean of his college has refused to support him. A final decision is expected next month.

"There's no love lost between Mr. Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science, and Mr. Dershowitz, a law professor. The two scholars have attacked each other repeatedly in the past few years, hurling accusations of plagiarism and polemicism at one another.

"They've taken adversarial stances on such issues as the Israel lobby, anti-Semitism, and what Mr. Finkelstein terms "the Holocaust industry." Mr. Dershowitz threatened to take legal action against the University of California Press if Mr. Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005) went to print with allegations that Mr. Dershowitz plagiarized portions of his 2003 book The Case for Israel (The Chronicle, July 22, 2005).

"Last fall, with Mr. Finkelstein up for tenure, Mr. Dershowitz sent the DePaul law school faculty and members of the political-science department what he described, in a letter dated October 3, as a "dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions."

"I hope that this will serve as an introduction and primer to the so-called scholarship that Finkelstein will present this term as he is considered for tenure," Mr. Dershowitz wrote.
Mr. Finkelstein said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Dershowitz had embarked on "this frenetic and relentless campaign to deny me tenure.""