True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 131: Norman Finkelstein Pt. 1
Aired: 2021-01-21
Duration: 01:25:02


=== Pull Back the Curtain (03:09) ===

[00:00:00]  Noah, what's the Hebrew word for girls?
[00:00:03]  Banot.
[00:00:04]  Banot?
[00:00:05]  Yeah, banote.
[00:00:06]  Banote.
[00:00:07]  I like that.
[00:00:08]  Banot.
[00:00:09]  Sounds a little Italian.
[00:00:10]  Oh, you want to know how you say dick?
[00:00:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:13]  Shmeckle.
[00:00:15]  Oh, I knew Schmeckle.
[00:00:15]  I knew Schmidt.
[00:00:16]  Isn't Schmeckle?
[00:00:17]  Schmeckle's Yiddish, though, right?
[00:00:19]  Yeah.
[00:00:19]  Oh, you want to know how you say asshole?
[00:00:22]  Yeah, Noah Colwyn.
[00:00:23]  God damn it.
[00:00:24]  I was going to say Brie spells.
[00:00:25]  Fuck you I'm taking a calm approach.
[00:00:56]  For our listeners, by the way, okay, I'm going to pull back the curtain because this is fun.
[00:01:00]  I like doing that.
[00:01:00]  Liz has been veiled by a curtain this entire time, so I'm excited for this.
[00:01:04]  Burka, yes.
[00:01:07]  Brace just tried recording a hello welcome, and it was the craziest thing.
[00:01:11]  It was so crazy that we couldn't hear it over the like video recording thing that we're using right now in our little video chat.
[00:01:19]  I did scream it.
[00:01:20]  Anyway, I'm taking the calm approach.
[00:01:23]  Yin yang, baby.
[00:01:24]  Well, to pull the curtain back further, I said, ladies and gentlemen, the moneylenders are in the temple, and here we fucking are.
[00:01:32]  I am Brace.
[00:01:33]  We have a special guest with us today.
[00:01:35]  Say your fucking name.
[00:01:36]  Noah Colwyn.
[00:01:38]  Noah Colwyn, you might know as the host, the sole host, because Brendan James, unfortunately, has passed away from Gulf War syndrome, a blowback podcast, season two on the way.
[00:01:48]  I don't know if you guys have mentioned that yet.
[00:01:50]  I don't know.
[00:01:51]  Yeah, yeah, no, no.
[00:01:52]  Yeah, if we have, this is good.
[00:01:52]  Keep the plug.
[00:01:53]  He shared with me some of the research, and I have actually developed Blowback 2, which is my podcast, which is just taking me the stuff that Noah sends me via text message sometime and sort of extrapolating and putting my own spin on it and rushing it out to market on a podcast player I'm developing with Spotify.
[00:02:11]  All right.
[00:02:11]  Well, I'm Liz.
[00:02:13]  We are, of course, joined by our producer, Young Chomsky.
[00:02:18]  And this is Trunon for the week.
[00:02:20]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:21]  Hello.
[00:02:22]  We have.
[00:02:24]  Fuck.
[00:02:25]  I'm so excited.
[00:02:28]  So, okay, we brought Noah in for a little backup here, a little plan.
[00:02:33]  We couldn't have this party without him.
[00:02:35]  We have a very special guest in what is part one of a wide-ranging interview.
[00:02:44]  And I think we should give a little bit of context for our listeners, particularly our Zoomer listeners.
[00:02:50]  I'm very sensitive to the Zoomer needs.
[00:02:54]  Bryce, you want to give us a little intro?
[00:02:57]  I'm passing this off to Noah because he's smarter than me.
[00:03:00]  Well, I accept the compliment, Brace, and affirm the sentiment.
[00:03:05]  Yes, I'm sub-submoronic and you're just sub-moronic.

=== Encouraging Reflection on Norman Finkelstein (06:46) ===

[00:03:09]  Yeah, I'll take that.
[00:03:09]  I mean, look, for Jews, it's not so bad.
[00:03:11]  Oh, my God.
[00:03:13]  So Norman Finkelstein is probably like to the extent that we have debates today about things like deplatforming, about things like cancel culture, about things like, you know, stripping intellectuals of their ability to put forward, you know, perfectly reasonable ideas in the public sphere.
[00:03:33]  Norman Finkelstein was one of the people from whom that right was, you know, most violently ripped.
[00:03:38]  Along with Steve Salisha and other, you know, like academics who talk about Israel-Palestine, Norman Finkelstein was persecuted by people ranging from Alan Dershowitz to, I mean, practically you name it, any major universal, like universal condemnation as an anti-Semite and as a Holocaust denier.
[00:04:03]  And this was for simply offering a very radical critique of the way that the memory of the Holocaust was used in favor of the Israeli government, in favor of Israeli government policy.
[00:04:19]  And Norman Finkelstein is not an especially radical thinker.
[00:04:22]  There's a documentary about Finkelstein that I encourage you all to watch where the acclaimed, internationally respected Holocaust historian Roel Hillberg describes Norman as somebody who, although his actions and language may be hyperbolic, his conclusions are pretty moderate.
[00:04:39]  And as a result of his deplatforming, after talking with Brayson Liz, we thought that it would be a really great opportunity to talk with him, not just about the nature of his scholarship and the way in which he was, you know, he lost his job and was shunned from public life later in his life, but also about his origins and how he came to pursue the path of scholarship that he did.
[00:05:03]  Because quite frankly, he's been denied that right in a lot of different venues for quite a long time.
[00:05:10]  Yeah, I also want to say, like, I mean, I don't, you know, we're not having a big discussion on cancel culture.
[00:05:15]  And I think that that almost feels like Like a petty version of what happened to him or something.
[00:05:23]  Like the way people wield, I don't know, like the way people wield that debate and, you know, whatever they want to call cancel culture, like what happened to Norm and what was like, you know, I think what will become evident, or at least was evident to me in this interview, like what has been taken from us as he's been basically completely ostracized and exiled from like the entire academic,
[00:05:51]  intellectual and political world in America is like a much, is like much, much bigger crime than I think that a lot of people maybe realize when they talk about that, whether they, when they use that term, you know.
[00:06:08]  Something that struck me that I just, because we should just roll into the interview.
[00:06:12]  And I just want to say like, this, this interview is a bit different for us.
[00:06:17]  It's like really just like letting him go.
[00:06:20]  And I think that he has got a lot to say and that we have a lot to listen to in particular.
[00:06:26]  But there was something that when I, you know, when I was sitting here listening to him speak, I was reminded of something that James Baldwin really remarked on, which is that he really felt that generations had a lot to learn from each other.
[00:06:44]  And this is something that I think, you know, it's very trendy to rail against boomers and rail against, you know, and boomers railed against their, you know, their parents' generation.
[00:06:58]  And, you know, our kids will rail against our generation, et cetera.
[00:07:03]  But I would urge people to kind of maybe stop for a second, take a pause, because we have a lot to learn from each other.
[00:07:14]  And we definitely have a lot to learn from Norman Finkelstein.
[00:07:19]  Yeah, I mean, if I may, real quick, like, you know, Norman Finkelstein, I know a little bit about his life.
[00:07:26]  I've read some of his books.
[00:07:27]  You know, I've watched the documentary on him.
[00:07:28]  I've listened to a lot of interviews with him.
[00:07:30]  And to me, a real tragedy is that, like, yeah, a wide variety of forces, you know, from across the political spectrum basically colluded and didn't even need to collude.
[00:07:42]  They were all just part of sort of the same mindset, you know, came together to essentially try to erase this man from public life and to ruin his life.
[00:07:50]  Literally, we lots of collusion.
[00:07:53]  Absolutely.
[00:07:54]  And, you know, and talking to him, because, yeah, before this interview, like I, you know, I know a bit about, you know, Mr. Finkelstein's life or Professor Finkelstein, I don't know what to call him.
[00:08:03]  Norman Finkelstein's fucking life.
[00:08:05]  He's a first name, last night name guy.
[00:08:08]  And to me, part of the tragedy isn't just that like we that that that that more people were robbed essentially of of his intellectual ideas, but were robbed of the man as himself because we do not have I will say many of our so-called public intellectuals these days, especially people of my generation, are men and women of different caliber than this.
[00:08:29]  And so I really encourage you, and it's sort of a long interview, and it's the first of multiple ones.
[00:08:37]  And I really encourage you to listen to this and take what this man says to heart.
[00:08:43]  Young Chomsky, roll Norman.
[00:08:46]  Well, welcome to this week's very special episode of Truanon.
[00:09:14]  And, you know, I was going to say that this guest needs no introduction, despite the fact that in the preceding segment, we did just introduce him, and I am also going to ask him to introduce himself.
[00:09:25]  But we have us with us today Norman Finkelstein.
[00:09:28]  Norman, how are you doing?
[00:09:30]  And, you know, just so I don't have to interrupt you, tell us a little bit about your background.
[00:09:37]  Well, at 67, I have a lot of background, and it's hard to decide what is and isn't important for your viewers and listeners because I don't know them.
[00:09:53]  I'll try to put it in a nutshell.

=== Growing Up in Shadows (15:11) ===

[00:09:56]  My parents passed through the Nazi Holocaust.
[00:10:00]  They were both from Poland, from Warsaw.
[00:10:03]  They were both in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 until the repression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943.
[00:10:17]  There were about 20 or 30,000 survivors of the ghetto, and they were all deported to Majdanek concentration camp.
[00:10:29]  My parents were among the deportees.
[00:10:33]  My father was apparently, I never talked about it with him, but my mother told me at some point that my father had been in eight concentration camps and he ended up in Auschwitz and he was in the Auschwitz death march.
[00:10:48]  My mother was in several slave labor camps.
[00:10:52]  She was liberated by the Russians.
[00:10:56]  My father was liberated by the Americans.
[00:10:59]  They then ended up in what was called the DP camp, displaced people camp, in Linz, Austria.
[00:11:07]  And eventually they made their way to the United States.
[00:11:11]  I grew up in a very modest home.
[00:11:16]  My father was a factory worker.
[00:11:19]  Eventually he became a foreman.
[00:11:21]  My mother raised the three kids because she was a typical doting Jewish mother to begin with.
[00:11:28]  But secondly, she didn't trust anyone with the kids.
[00:11:33]  And thirdly, we had no living relatives on my mother and father's side, both of them.
[00:11:38]  On both the sides, every single member of the family was exterminated.
[00:11:43]  I had no grandparents.
[00:11:45]  I had no aunts.
[00:11:46]  I had no uncles.
[00:11:47]  I had no cousins.
[00:11:48]  Everybody was dead.
[00:11:50]  I was exterminated.
[00:11:53]  So it wasn't as if a family member can be called in to take care of us.
[00:11:59]  It was just, as my late mother used to say, just five people in the world, her, my father, and my two siblings, and myself.
[00:12:10]  I grew up in what you would call a lower middle class neighborhood.
[00:12:15]  Eventually, we made it into the lower middle class.
[00:12:18]  We grew up originally before I was born, because I was the last child.
[00:12:24]  We grew up in real poverty, but eventually we made it into what you would call the lower middle class.
[00:12:31]  And it happened back then.
[00:12:34]  Schools were very good.
[00:12:35]  Public schools were excellent.
[00:12:37]  If I were to tell you who attended my high school, you would probably not even believe it.
[00:12:44]  My high school, Bernie Sanders attended my high school.
[00:12:49]  Charles Schumer attended my high school.
[00:12:53]  The current Senate, now the Senate Majority Leader.
[00:12:56]  Most powerful Jew in the history of the United States.
[00:13:00]  Charles Schumer.
[00:13:01]  Norm Coleman, the senator, went to my high school.
[00:13:05]  At some point, now remember, I'm talking about a public high school, a regular public high school.
[00:13:15]  Judge Judy went to my high school.
[00:13:18]  Of course.
[00:13:20]  What's her name?
[00:13:21]  Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
[00:13:25]  Carol King.
[00:13:26]  Carol King went to my high school.
[00:13:29]  Stanley Kaplan, you know the Kaplan preparation courses?
[00:13:33]  Yeah, sure.
[00:13:35]  I don't, but I'm sure they exist.
[00:13:39]  Stanley Kaplan went to my high school.
[00:13:42]  Not one, not two, not three, not four.
[00:13:46]  Five.
[00:13:47]  Five Nobel laureates went to my high school.
[00:13:50]  Five.
[00:13:52]  Carl Becker, the economist.
[00:13:56]  Alan Robert Solow, the economist.
[00:14:01]  It was a real testament.
[00:14:02]  Whenever you hear this talk about, oh, we need charter schools and oh, we need competition with the public schools.
[00:14:11]  That's just a lot of crap.
[00:14:13]  If you want those schools to succeed, those schools can succeed.
[00:14:17]  We were not rich.
[00:14:19]  You know, I remember I was, I would say, I was not friends, but I was acquainted with Charles Schumer's sister, Fran.
[00:14:30]  Fran was my, Fran was brilliant, like Charles.
[00:14:33]  Chuck Schumer is a brilliant guy.
[00:14:35]  He's a total crook, depraved crook.
[00:14:38]  Of course.
[00:14:39]  He's a very smart guy, no two ways about it.
[00:14:42]  And his sister was brilliant also.
[00:14:45]  And his sister, Fran, was the girlfriend of my best friend, Mark Hone.
[00:14:52]  So I knew her through him when they went out.
[00:14:56]  I would join them often.
[00:14:59]  The point I was going to make was: I have a very vivid recollection of these people.
[00:15:04]  You know, Fran would come to school in very drab clothes.
[00:15:08]  Her father was an exterminator.
[00:15:10]  Chuck Schumer, his father was an exterminator.
[00:15:14]  Bernie Sanders, his father was a door-to-door salesman.
[00:15:18]  These are very modest background, but the schools worked.
[00:15:24]  They functioned.
[00:15:26]  And so you were able, if you were that ambitious, and the lower middle class Jews were extremely ambitious to the point of it being obnoxious, but no, you have to acknowledge the good and the bad.
[00:15:42]  The good was they realized their dreams.
[00:15:46]  I could tell you, person one wanted to be this, person two wanted to be that, person three wanted to be this, that, that.
[00:15:56]  I can name you everyone from my high school, you know, my crowd.
[00:16:00]  You know what?
[00:16:02]  Everybody achieved what they wanted.
[00:16:04]  One wanted to do film, one wanted to be a Broadway producer, one wanted to be an orchestra leader, and of course it's Jews, so the other seven wanted to be doctors.
[00:16:17]  They all achieved it.
[00:16:19]  You know, it was a testament both to the opportunities of that era when the economy was thriving, the opportunities, but it was also a testament to the system worked for a lot of people.
[00:16:36]  It really worked.
[00:16:38]  You get a first-class education in a public school paid for with taxpayer money, and you are able to compete on an equal footing with the best and the brightest being turned out by the private schools.
[00:16:57]  One question, you know, I grew up in a not totally dissimilar milieu a few generations down the line in the Newark, New Jersey area.
[00:17:07]  And I think one of the things that I saw is sort of those kinds of middle-class Jews and people you describe coming from that sort of background.
[00:17:16]  You know, as they assimilated and went up, I think that there's a kind of story that gets told about their politics, which is that Jews took their liberal politics with them and that Jews were more just and righteous than I think other white people.
[00:17:32]  And I'm kind of curious, as somebody who sort of grew up during what I think is sort of the zenith that time, I mean, you grew up with Chuck Schumer, who's now Senate Majority Leader, and Bernie Sanders is a few years ahead of you, and there's those famous images of him in the civil rights struggle.
[00:17:44]  To what extent, how do you relate to that kind of narrative?
[00:17:48]  You ask a tough question because it's actually an involved answer to that question.
[00:17:54]  Most of what's said about Jews and the civil rights movement, it's just pure mythology.
[00:18:02]  I grew up in the lower, as I said, I have to just correct you one point before I continue.
[00:18:08]  Please.
[00:18:08]  You say you grew up several generations past me, which of course you did, but it was not the same generation.
[00:18:16]  It was not the same class anymore.
[00:18:19]  My generation, which is probably your father's generation and mother's generation, they had made it.
[00:18:26]  Their kids did not go to state universities.
[00:18:29]  Their kids went to solid Ivy League universities.
[00:18:34]  They grew up, were quite comfortable.
[00:18:38]  We were really not comfortable.
[00:18:39]  We were lower middle class, ambitious, ambitious, but not yet comfortable.
[00:18:46]  The lower middle class Jews were so horrifyingly racist, it's hard to believe.
[00:18:57]  Now, part of it may have been, you know, we talked about it back then.
[00:19:02]  It may have been because they were fresh out of Brownsville.
[00:19:06]  Now, remember, the Jews from the beginning of the 20th century, say from 1900 to 1930, they were in ghetto areas, where you could call Jewish ghettos in the Lower East Side.
[00:19:19]  So they were the last ones out before African Americans, blacks moved in.
[00:19:26]  The racism in my neighborhood, it was so thick.
[00:19:33]  Mine was the only family I knew.
[00:19:36]  Remember, my family is not a typical American Jewish family.
[00:19:41]  We were called, my parents were called the Greenhorns.
[00:19:45]  That means they came over from Europe.
[00:19:47]  They didn't turn right there.
[00:19:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:49]  The Greenhorns.
[00:19:50]  And everybody hated them, my parents, because they were so un-American, un-Americanized.
[00:19:58]  Yeah.
[00:19:59]  Have no desire to become American.
[00:20:01]  They did not have a high regard for American life, but let's just put that aside.
[00:20:07]  So in every other home I would go in, black people would be referred to either as collids, as in C-U-L-L-I-D-S.
[00:20:19]  Most often, they were referred to as schwartzas, the Yiddish slang for, it's not quite named, but it's pretty close.
[00:20:29]  And then in those families which didn't have the Lower East Side Yiddish background, they were just called niggas.
[00:20:38]  I give you an example.
[00:20:40]  So probably the number two person in my class is Philip Pulaski.
[00:20:48]  And he's now a top-notch urologist.
[00:20:52]  I think he's a urologist, but I could be mistaken.
[00:20:55]  Classic Jewish profession.
[00:20:56]  Yeah, well, because it's the second highest paying doctor after plastic surgeon is urologist.
[00:21:04]  So maids, what we called back then maids, cleaning women, they would come in the neighborhood during the day, and we had a private bus line because the sitting bus line didn't go through our neighborhood.
[00:21:18]  It was called the Pioneer Bus.
[00:21:21]  And the maids would leave at five o'clock.
[00:21:23]  The workday is over.
[00:21:26]  And Philip Pulaski used to call that five o'clock bus.
[00:21:30]  He called it the Nor Express.
[00:21:32]  Yeah.
[00:21:33]  Philip Roth.
[00:21:34]  That doesn't surprise me.
[00:21:35]  When a black person would just walk in the neighborhood, just walk in the neighborhood.
[00:21:43]  Don't ask me why.
[00:21:44]  How he or she ended up, it wasn't, no, it wasn't she, because she, everyone just assumed, were the quote-unquote maids.
[00:21:51]  If a black male walked in, we had a civic association, had a private police, a private police.
[00:22:03]  Immediately, the neighbors would alert the civic association: here's the black person walking, and the civic association police is following him, following him.
[00:22:16]  Couldn't let a black person in our neighborhood.
[00:22:19]  If you want to understand the real Jews of that era, not the fakery about, oh, Schroerner, Cheney, and Goodman, and Rabbi Heschel, the March on Washington.
[00:22:32]  The Jewish, one of the main, not the only, but one of the main Jewish professors, profession professions was teachers.
[00:22:41]  The teachers union was headed by Albert Schenker.
[00:22:45]  Now, what happened in New York was for my group, for my community, the schools worked.
[00:22:54]  In black communities, the schools didn't work.
[00:22:58]  So initially, they tried what was called busing, bringing in black people to white schools and white.
[00:23:08]  It was really one way.
[00:23:10]  It was black kids coming into white schools.
[00:23:12]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:14]  Our communities, I don't include my parents.
[00:23:17]  I'm not going to make them out to be saints, but they were cut from, they were not American.
[00:23:21]  They were European.
[00:23:22]  They passed through the Nazi Holocaust.
[00:23:25]  They had their own worldview, and it was not your typical Jewish worldview, American Jewish worldview.
[00:23:33]  So they tried the busing, and it was resisted, resisted, resisted.
[00:23:40]  And then, because of all the resistance to what was called back then integration, their new movement arose for community control, which is to say, our schools don't work.
[00:23:53]  You don't want our students, then let us figure out how to make our schools work.
[00:24:00]  It was a natural conclusion.
[00:24:02]  If you don't want integration, if you don't want our kids, and our kids are failing, then let us be in charge of our kids and figure out how to get them to succeed.
[00:24:12]  And the teachers' union did not like that.
[00:24:15]  And the teachers' union did not like that.
[00:24:18]  The teachers' union then went on a very bitter strike.
[00:24:23]  You'd be surprised.
[00:24:25]  Remember, we are ordinary kids, very studious, very ambitious.
[00:24:31]  It was a 1968 teacher strike.
[00:24:35]  And the person who headed it was Albert Schenker.
[00:24:39]  Schenker was a complete monster, just a complete monster.
[00:24:44]  And the union was predominantly Jewish.
[00:24:46]  That was a Jewish profession, teachers.
[00:24:49]  The strike went on September, no school.
[00:24:54]  October, no school.
[00:24:58]  November, no school.
[00:25:01]  The strike lasted three months.
[00:25:03]  It was very bitter, very bitter.

=== Jewish Teachers' Strike (15:12) ===

[00:25:07]  And then all the, so to speak, the hatred which was in the shadows between Jews and blacks, it came out with a viciousness.
[00:25:21]  Now, it wasn't that the strike just made it visible what was going on.
[00:25:31]  I remember, I know you couldn't even imagine these things, but I have a vivid memory.
[00:25:37]  One of my best friends, Richard Horne.
[00:25:41]  I was fifth grade, sixth grade.
[00:25:43]  I remember we're down in the basement.
[00:25:46]  His mother's there, his father's there, and neighbors are there, and they love to bait me because I was the, in nowadays terms, the politically correct liberal.
[00:25:56]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:57]  So they love to bait me.
[00:25:59]  And they would say, you know all black people on welfare own Cadillacs.
[00:26:04]  You know black people, all black people on welfare own Cadillacs.
[00:26:09]  Then in 1968 or 69, I can't remember, there was this guy named Arthur Jensen.
[00:26:16]  And Arthur Jensen taught at Harvard.
[00:26:19]  And he came out with a very famous article in Harvard Educational Review, in which he claimed black people are intellectually inferior genetically.
[00:26:30]  Okay?
[00:26:31]  So then Richard's mother, who by the way, she had a master's degree, which was very unusual for anyone back then.
[00:26:37]  And she was a woman.
[00:26:38]  And she taught.
[00:26:39]  She was a teacher.
[00:26:40]  She'd say, look what Harvard Educational Review says.
[00:26:45]  That black people are inferior.
[00:26:47]  So who are you to say they're not?
[00:26:49]  You know?
[00:26:50]  Then I had a friend, Ellen Schoenfeld.
[00:26:53]  I'm sitting on her stoop.
[00:26:55]  I'm arguing with her brother, Richard.
[00:26:58]  You know what, Richard, we're arguing about?
[00:27:00]  I mean, it's like kind of surreal now.
[00:27:02]  Richard's saying, all should be put in gas chambers.
[00:27:07]  Jesus.
[00:27:09]  Which was funny considering where my parents ended up.
[00:27:13]  My parents' families ended up.
[00:27:16]  Of course, yeah.
[00:27:17]  All m should be put in gas chambers.
[00:27:19]  That was the attitude.
[00:27:22]  Now there's all this revision about revisionism, about how the Jews and the blacks got along so well.
[00:27:28]  It's all crap.
[00:27:30]  You're not going to, you know, so long as I live, which is not to eternity, I'm very short of eternity, by the way, you're not going to play that game with me.
[00:27:41]  Where do you think that revisionism comes from?
[00:27:44]  Well, because Jews love to think that they're beautiful.
[00:27:47]  They love to think they're perfect.
[00:27:49]  It was very interesting to watch because I had a very good friend.
[00:27:54]  I don't want to ever say a bad word about her because she just passed away from cancer, as did my friend Mark, Franz Schumer's boyfriend.
[00:28:02]  Sorry to hear that.
[00:28:03]  They both died last year from cancer.
[00:28:06]  But Maxine was her name.
[00:28:09]  Very smart.
[00:28:10]  I liked her a lot.
[00:28:11]  She was my high school sweetheart.
[00:28:13]  And 90% of the reason I liked her was because she's just very smart.
[00:28:17]  And she was also pretty, but she was very smart.
[00:28:21]  Never hurts.
[00:28:23]  And Maxine did not like black people.
[00:28:26]  She was not as virulent as others because it was so gauche, so gross.
[00:28:34]  But she didn't like black people.
[00:28:36]  She didn't like them for a different reason, kind of.
[00:28:39]  She was very smart, very competitive.
[00:28:42]  And she was one of these people that you have to earn everything you gain.
[00:28:48]  And she felt black people were getting benefits because of, you know, it was the early years, the very early.
[00:28:55]  It wasn't yet.
[00:28:57]  The Baki case, the famous affirmative action case, comes in 74, I think.
[00:29:03]  So it's just a few years, but already it began this giving certain entitlements to black people to compensate for a situation which was untenable.
[00:29:14]  Everything was all, every institution.
[00:29:16]  You go back, go back and watch a situation comedy from the 1960s.
[00:29:22]  Go back and watch a dance show like the American Dance Stand.
[00:29:27]  Everything is white.
[00:29:29]  You just can't believe it.
[00:29:30]  If you go on YouTube, and I mean, I cringe now when I look at what those programs look like.
[00:29:37]  Everything looked like some version of the Ku Klux Klan meeting.
[00:29:42]  So there was an effort made to try to shape this up a little.
[00:29:46]  And Maxine didn't like that.
[00:29:48]  And anyhow, because she wanted you have to earn it.
[00:29:51]  You know, it was the lower middle class mentality.
[00:29:54]  You're struggling, you're fighting.
[00:29:56]  You know, grade point average.
[00:29:59]  We didn't calculate grade point average like 96, 95.
[00:30:03]  That's not how we calculate.
[00:30:05]  We calculate 96.4.7, 0.467.
[00:30:10]  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:12]  You understand?
[00:30:12]  That's the way we were.
[00:30:14]  Bran Schumer, she was competing with Virginia DiMario to be the top female student in the class.
[00:30:22]  It came down to the hundredth decimal point.
[00:30:27]  No, it's true.
[00:30:29]  I'm sure.
[00:30:31]  Fran came in first, even though she was much smarter than Virginia, but in terms of grade point average, it came down to the hundredth point.
[00:30:38]  That's the way we were.
[00:30:40]  Dear Christ.
[00:30:41]  Maxine didn't like it that anybody got any, so to speak, freebies.
[00:30:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:50]  The reason I mentioned her, it was very interesting to me to watch.
[00:30:54]  Maxine ended up marrying an Israeli.
[00:30:58]  And she moved to Israel.
[00:31:01]  And we had a conversation.
[00:31:04]  It was 1982.
[00:31:07]  And she started to refer to the Arab Busham, Arab Busham, which is like the Arab names.
[00:31:17]  It's the Hebrew.
[00:31:19]  Yeah.
[00:31:20]  The Hebrew slur.
[00:31:21]  Yes.
[00:31:22]  And I thought to myself, how easily Maxine made the transition from hating black people to hating Arabs.
[00:31:33]  Yeah.
[00:31:34]  That's why it was so easy for American Jews to assimilate the post-June 67 ethic.
[00:31:42]  Because for them, all the Arabs were just surrogate black people.
[00:31:49]  Same feelings they had for black people, they now projected on Arabs.
[00:31:54]  They never saw an Arab, but growing up, the only Arab we ever saw was, oh, God, from Dr. Shivago, who isn't.
[00:32:02]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:03]  I know you're Omar, Omar Sharif.
[00:32:06]  Omar Sharif.
[00:32:07]  That's the only Arab we ever heard of, Omar Sharif.
[00:32:11]  But they so easily came to hate Arabs.
[00:32:15]  And in my mind, the reason it was so easy is they just made the transition from black people to Arabs.
[00:32:25]  You mentioned that your parents had a different worldview, though.
[00:32:28]  You said it wasn't just that, I mean, you mentioned that it was part of it, you think, is because they weren't Americanized and they weren't interested in that kind of culture.
[00:32:37]  Can you explain their views a little bit?
[00:32:39]  Look, my parents were weird birds.
[00:32:42]  They were strange birds.
[00:32:44]  I never understood it growing up because I didn't know there was anything odd about it.
[00:32:49]  My parents, number one, they looked at the world through one lens, only one lens, the Nazi Holocaust.
[00:32:57]  Nothing else happened.
[00:32:58]  They didn't care.
[00:32:59]  They cared about the world.
[00:33:01]  They cared about politics, but only through the lens of the Nazi Holocaust.
[00:33:06]  So the first thing to say about my parents is they would not brook any criticism, any whatsoever, of Joseph Stalin.
[00:33:18]  Nothing.
[00:33:19]  Anything you said critical of Stalin, the first thing they would say is, traitor, you're a traitor.
[00:33:25]  Yes.
[00:33:26]  Because from their point of view, which is factually correct, the Red Army defeated the Nazis.
[00:33:32]  That's all they cared about.
[00:33:33]  I never tried.
[00:33:34]  First of all, I never even knew it was strange.
[00:33:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:40]  Well, I will be fair, is that there were a number of Jews in New York City who would not say a bad word about Stalin.
[00:33:47]  I would go to high school, in grade school, forget high school, grade school, junior high school.
[00:33:53]  I'd be defending Stalin.
[00:33:56]  And, you know, I'm sure, first of all, for most kids in the class, they didn't even know who the hell Stalin was.
[00:34:05]  In front of my house, that was table talk.
[00:34:09]  Right, right, right.
[00:34:10]  It was a strange house.
[00:34:12]  It was a strange, yeah.
[00:34:13]  Stalin was table talk.
[00:34:16]  And so they were very loyal to the Soviet Union.
[00:34:22]  They were not communists.
[00:34:24]  They only cared about the Soviet Union because it defeated the Nazis.
[00:34:27]  And because they had a genuine affection for the Russian people, because they felt the Russian people understood war.
[00:34:36]  And that was something very important to my parents.
[00:34:40]  That somebody could understand the suffering that they endured.
[00:34:45]  And what really separated the Russian experience from the Jewish experience in the war was really just a hair's breadth.
[00:34:55]  Absolutely.
[00:34:56]  The Russians lost, you know, the estimates vary, but you could say between 20 and 30 million people.
[00:35:04]  It was very interesting.
[00:35:06]  For me, it was a real revelation, not epiphany, but a revelation.
[00:35:13]  When I was in seventh grade, so we're studying world history, and there's a bar graph.
[00:35:21]  And the bar graph is deaths during World War II.
[00:35:25]  So the first bar, of course, is the United States, 200,000 Americans killed.
[00:35:32]  Then the next bar is the UK, 400,000 British killed.
[00:35:40]  The next bar is Russia.
[00:35:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:44]  30 million.
[00:35:45]  I mean, they lose more in one battle than we lost in the entire war.
[00:35:49]  Correct, just in the Battle of Leningrad.
[00:35:52]  Last of the year, a million people were killed.
[00:35:55]  That was more.
[00:35:56]  Battle of Leningrad.
[00:35:58]  then, or the siege of Leningrad, then all American and British deaths doubled.
[00:36:05]  You came out of this milieu and you became a Maoist.
[00:36:32]  Um...
[00:36:33]  My parents are very anti-war, fanatically anti-war.
[00:36:39]  You can't understand because it's something that will die with me, which kind of, you know, in some way it saddens me.
[00:36:45]  But to understand that ethic, that mentality, that emotional burden, when we used to watch the Vietnam War on TV at night, in the news, and they would have, the news always began with the Vietnam War, and then they would have some horrific scene from Vietnam.
[00:37:09]  Immediately, as the image of the war came up on the TV screen, my mother would turn her head like this, hold up her hand, and say, Tell me when it's over.
[00:37:21]  Yeah.
[00:37:21]  Now, my mother was not a drama queen, not at all.
[00:37:25]  Not at all.
[00:37:26]  She didn't play to any crowd, but she physically could not look at it.
[00:37:33]  She physically could not look at it.
[00:37:37]  And that was the ethos that I grew up with.
[00:37:45]  Though I then became, as you say, I became a Maoist, so I had to support armed struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
[00:37:53]  One thing that made being a Maoist a little bit easier for me was couldn't read Chinese.
[00:37:59]  China was very pro-Stalin.
[00:38:02]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:03]  70% good, 30% bad, according to that.
[00:38:05]  Exactly.
[00:38:07]  So at least that part came easy to me.
[00:38:11]  Of course, as you just said correctly, the Chinese position was 70% good, 30% bad.
[00:38:18]  My mother and father's position was 100% good.
[00:38:21]  And if you think there's anything bad, you're a traitor.
[00:38:24]  Well, that's your parents, of course, were followers of Enver Hoxha then.
[00:38:29]  No, they didn't know how to get in you are.
[00:38:32]  No, maybe they didn't know.
[00:38:33]  No, they didn't know.
[00:38:35]  So you get on to college at this point.
[00:38:38]  And can you tell us a little bit about kind of where that led you?
[00:38:42]  Well, college was a, I can't say it was an intellectually satisfying period in my life because I was such a I was so dogmatic.
[00:38:52]  How do you mean?
[00:38:54]  What do I mean?
[00:38:55]  Okay.
[00:38:56]  Here would be typical courses I would take in a semester.
[00:39:00]  Yeah.
[00:39:01]  Marx won, Engels won, Marx and Engels won.
[00:39:07]  Engels and Marx won.
[00:39:09]  Marx, Engels, Lenin won.
[00:39:12]  Semester two.
[00:39:14]  Marx two.
[00:39:15]  Engels two.
[00:39:17]  Mark.
[00:39:18]  Yeah, I agree.
[00:39:18]  Not enough Lenin.
[00:39:20]  Exactly.
[00:39:20]  Yeah, there's a dearth of Lenin there.
[00:39:22]  I admire your commitment to studying history, but you're lacking in theory, pal.
[00:39:29]  It was pure, pure distilled insanity.
[00:39:35]  Do I regret it?
[00:39:36]  Yeah, actually, I do.
[00:39:41]  Because I was a moron.
[00:39:46]  I mean, I worked very hard.
[00:39:48]  I worked very hard.
[00:39:49]  I'm Jewish at the end of the day and at the beginning of the day, and probably most of the day, I'm Jewish.
[00:39:56]  Yeah.
[00:39:56]  And so I studied very hard.
[00:39:58]  I graduated in three years, and the grade point average was in a scale of four.
[00:40:05]  I graduated with a 3.96.
[00:40:09]  Jesus Christ.
[00:40:10]  I encountered 100, but 3.96.
[00:40:14]  So I worked hard, but I was totally.

=== Fighting for Beliefs (02:06) ===

[00:40:19]  We were young.
[00:40:20]  You know that song, Those Were the Days, My Friend, We Thought They'd Never End.
[00:40:24]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:26]  And then we'd sing and dance.
[00:40:29]  We'd fight and never lose when we were young and sure to have our way.
[00:40:36]  And that's how we were, that's how I was.
[00:40:39]  We would fight and never lose.
[00:40:42]  We were sure to have our way.
[00:40:45]  I thought the revolution was coming.
[00:40:48]  I was going to be a revolutionary.
[00:40:52]  I was going to be in the vanguard party.
[00:40:58]  And so, in one way, I grew as I set my trajectory in life in those years.
[00:41:08]  And I never looked back.
[00:41:09]  Nothing really changed.
[00:41:12]  I knew what I was going to do with my life.
[00:41:15]  There was no possibility I would ever sell out.
[00:41:18]  I knew that about myself.
[00:41:21]  I was much more, I was, I think, much more sincere in my beliefs because for me,
[00:41:32]  it was kind of a vindication of my parents' suffering to try to create a world that was an alternative to the world that had exterminated a large part of my parents' family and destroyed them for life.
[00:41:53]  They were, my parents were damaged goods.
[00:41:57]  And I wanted, I was very committed to changing the world.
[00:42:04]  You know, you can have abstract theoretical beliefs, but a lot of times, however abstract and theoretical they are, not always, not always, but often enough, they come back to something very personal.

=== Why Did They Become Revolutionaries? (03:36) ===

[00:42:25]  If you read, for example, Lenin, why did Lenin become a revolutionary?
[00:42:32]  Why did he become a revolutionary?
[00:42:35]  I studied Lenin closely.
[00:42:37]  I admit I've not read the recent literature on him, but there was a time when his collected works came to 55 volumes.
[00:42:44]  I read 20 of them cover to cover.
[00:42:48]  And you can't help, you know, he came from a privileged background.
[00:42:54]  He was like eighth grade, grade eight nobility.
[00:43:02]  You can't help but feel that his hatred for the capitalist system came from the fact that his brother was killed by the Tsar.
[00:43:12]  His brother was a revolutionary, was captured and executed.
[00:43:16]  Hanged, yeah.
[00:43:17]  And even though in most biographies it's not highlighted, I kind of think that's what drove him.
[00:43:26]  Other people are complete enigmas.
[00:43:30]  Probably the most enigmatic and in many ways the most, I think, interesting figure in the history of radical socialism is Rosa Luxemburg.
[00:43:42]  Now, Rosa was a middle-class, Jewish, of course, Polish woman.
[00:43:54]  Yes.
[00:43:54]  And she was a cripple.
[00:43:56]  She had a hip defect.
[00:43:58]  Yes.
[00:43:59]  So this Polish, Jewish, female, middle-class cripple ends up becoming the leader of the radical wing of the German Workers' Party.
[00:44:18]  How did that happen?
[00:44:21]  How did that happen?
[00:44:23]  You know, a person like her really, she really is an enigma.
[00:44:31]  And there are things about her, just to give you one example.
[00:44:38]  First of all, she was like a force of nature.
[00:44:41]  She loved life.
[00:44:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:45]  I read her letters.
[00:44:46]  She would pick something that sort of intrigued her, botany, geology.
[00:44:53]  And then she would read up on everything there is on the subject.
[00:44:58]  She's not one of these monomaniacal leftists, very cultured, very literary, and had scrap art, botany, geology.
[00:45:13]  Not sure geology.
[00:45:14]  I forgot what the discipline was.
[00:45:18]  In any event, so her best friend is Clara Zetkin.
[00:45:23]  Yes.
[00:45:24]  And Clara Zetkin has a son, Kostia.
[00:45:29]  Kostia is Rosa's lover.
[00:45:33]  Yeah.
[00:45:35]  Kostia is 20 years younger than Rosa.
[00:45:40]  She is her best friend's son.
[00:45:45]  And that's her lover.
[00:45:48]  Very strange.
[00:45:49]  Could you imagine the conversation between Clara and Rosa?
[00:45:55]  I mean, it must have been just so strange.
[00:45:57]  Like, so tell me, Rosa, how is Kostia in debt?

=== Why We Left The Old Jewish Currents (06:16) ===

[00:46:02]  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:46:03]  What are you guys talking about?
[00:46:04]  You guys talk about me?
[00:46:06]  You're not talking about me, are you?
[00:46:10]  Well, in any case, she was kind of an enigmatic figure.
[00:46:16]  I have a lot of friends who they didn't turn out radical.
[00:46:20]  They were radical when they became my friends.
[00:46:22]  And they stood the course.
[00:46:23]  They're still where they were when I met them.
[00:46:26]  And quite a few of them I can't quite figure out.
[00:46:30]  But in my case, the apple did not fall far from the trees.
[00:46:34]  I know that my commitment came from the horrific suffering that my parents endured to the last breath of their life.
[00:46:44]  And so I knew I would stay the course.
[00:46:47]  You know, a lot of times parents would say, ah, you know, when I'm in 16 years old, my friends, ah, Norman, he'll grow out of it.
[00:46:56]  It's a phase.
[00:46:56]  It's a phase.
[00:46:57]  No, it wasn't a phase.
[00:46:59]  Yeah, you never grew out of it, which is, well, I will say, no, I will say, as a Jew from New York who was into, you know, radical politics, or at least, you know, politics outside the norm in his youth, no pun intended there.
[00:47:15]  Quite a lot of Jewish people who were into, let's say, not so mainstream politics from New York City, in fact, not only abandoned those politics, but took them to the other side.
[00:47:26]  They were fakes.
[00:47:28]  You know, when we were in college, so we all had our little sex.
[00:47:34]  There were the Stalinists, the Maoists, the Trotskyists, the anarchists.
[00:47:39]  The most radical were supposed to be the Spartacists, the Trotskyists.
[00:47:43]  Oh, yes.
[00:47:45]  They're still around.
[00:47:46]  They used to come to our.
[00:47:48]  We did a union drive here.
[00:47:50]  I worked at a brewery in San Francisco.
[00:47:52]  We organized a union.
[00:47:53]  And Spartacus would come to our union rallies like when we were going to vote and denounce us to ourselves at the rally that we organized to join a union.
[00:48:03]  It was, I got to admit.
[00:48:07]  It takes some verse.
[00:48:08]  They would always call me petty bourgeois.
[00:48:10]  Oh, everyone was calling you bourgeois.
[00:48:14]  So the head of the Spartacist Youth League was a guy named Samai Zakharov.
[00:48:20]  Sami Zakharov.
[00:48:22]  Now he's a right-wing law professor at NYU.
[00:48:26]  That's the Spartans for you.
[00:48:27]  So whenever I would talk in Israel-Palestine, I didn't call for workers' revolution in the Middle East.
[00:48:34]  They would come raise their hand.
[00:48:37]  We have to have socialist revolution from the whole Middle East.
[00:48:42]  And I'm a petty bourgeois.
[00:48:43]  I said, look, don't give me the petty bourgeois.
[00:48:46]  You're going to end up a banker.
[00:48:48]  You know your type.
[00:48:50]  Statistically.
[00:48:51]  Yeah, so I can't say I learned a lot in college, but I set myself for my life's course.
[00:48:59]  And in that respect, it was a wonderful time.
[00:49:33]  And so when you were sort of, you know, like at this juncture and you're beginning your path of scholarship that would, you know.
[00:49:41]  I didn't have any path of scholarship then.
[00:49:43]  Well, then what was it then?
[00:49:45]  Allow us.
[00:49:45]  Allow us to grant us this characterization.
[00:49:49]  I was complete imbecile.
[00:49:52]  Well, so as fine then, as an imbecile stumbling in the dark toward the light, like us all in some form or another.
[00:50:01]  I'm not.
[00:50:02]  I want to say I'm proudly going to remain an imbecile for you.
[00:50:05]  Hopefully soon.
[00:50:06]  To all of our benefit.
[00:50:08]  By the way, you know, you work for Jewish, you work, you've written for Jewish currents.
[00:50:13]  I knew the old Jewish currents.
[00:50:16]  And the old Jewish currents was a very interesting phenomenon because they were all ex-Stalinists.
[00:50:23]  Yes.
[00:50:23]  They were complete apologists for the Soviet Union.
[00:50:26]  When Khrushchev's speech came out, they all withdrew from the Communist Party, but they had the same mentality.
[00:50:35]  And they just switched all of their loyalties from Mother Russia to Mother Israel.
[00:50:41]  And they became these staunch defenders of Israel.
[00:50:45]  I had unpleasant exchanges with them.
[00:50:49]  Though I have to tell you, the editor was a guy named Maris Schapis.
[00:50:55]  Yes, yes, I know who he is.
[00:50:57]  And there was on the editorial board people like Annette Rubinstein.
[00:51:02]  They were so smart.
[00:51:05]  They were smart.
[00:51:07]  And they were committed.
[00:51:08]  And they had to respect that.
[00:51:11]  But they could never get that Communist Party mentality out of their head.
[00:51:16]  They just switched it to Israel.
[00:51:19]  And so they wouldn't brook serious criticism of Israel.
[00:51:24]  I remember I was very close for a period of my life, about 30 years.
[00:51:29]  I was very close to Professor Chomsky.
[00:51:33]  And they hated Chomsky.
[00:51:36]  They hated Chomsky.
[00:51:38]  Well, in the long run, whose critique holds up?
[00:51:42]  It wasn't Jewish currents.
[00:51:44]  It was Chomsky.
[00:51:44]  If you go back and read Chomsky's earliest books, like Peace in the Middle East, which he writes in 9, which is a collection of essays, in 1974, it comes out.
[00:51:56]  You know what?
[00:51:56]  It still holds up.
[00:51:58]  Correct.
[00:52:01]  He wins that debate.
[00:52:02]  When you were at this point after college and you're sort of, you know, like beginning, I mean, basically, I'm kind of curious how you began the path of scholarship at whichever point you found the light toward addressing and critiquing from time immemorial.
[00:52:16]  What happened?
[00:52:16]  How did that journey take place?

=== Defying Expectations (07:20) ===

[00:52:19]  Well, that journey took place basically.
[00:52:23]  I worked for a year in a radical Maoist newspaper called The Guardian.
[00:52:31]  And I was always the rebel because I didn't trust orthodoxy in general.
[00:52:37]  Also, it's right to rebel.
[00:52:39]  Don't ask me to reconcile my fanaticism with my doubts about orthodoxy.
[00:52:46]  I don't know.
[00:52:49]  No, I understand.
[00:52:50]  I remember I used to go to the Guardian newspaper, which was fanatically Maoist, and I would be reading Trotsky's Trotsky and Literature and Art or Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.
[00:53:05]  You know, doing that is like reading Malcolm X and the Ku Klux Klan meeting.
[00:53:11]  You don't need to.
[00:53:14]  You're not supposed to do that.
[00:53:17]  But that was me.
[00:53:18]  In any event, after working at the radical newspaper, The Guardian, I went to graduate school at Princeton.
[00:53:27]  Complete disaster.
[00:53:31]  But then the main intervening event when I was in graduate school was Mao Tedong's death.
[00:53:39]  Now, of course, I knew Mao Tzedong was going to die because as much as Mao Tedong lived like him, they're the struggle, dare to win.
[00:53:50]  And red in the east rises the sun.
[00:53:55]  China's brought for the Mao Zedong.
[00:53:59]  For all of that, we knew it was finite.
[00:54:03]  Yes.
[00:54:04]  And to that extent, we were historical materials.
[00:54:10]  Well, I will say, in defiance of historical materialism, even though the guy was old, he could still swim like a much younger man.
[00:54:17]  So I wouldn't blame you.
[00:54:18]  You know, I think the swimming was true.
[00:54:20]  That's what I read.
[00:54:21]  I don't know.
[00:54:22]  Oh, it's no.
[00:54:23]  Believe me.
[00:54:24]  No one, I have investigated the swimming.
[00:54:26]  Yeah, I think it was true.
[00:54:28]  An embarrassing amount.
[00:54:29]  It is true.
[00:54:30]  By all accounts, it's true.
[00:54:31]  What, that he could swim really well?
[00:54:33]  He could swim like a true revolution when he was already quite old.
[00:54:38]  He apparently broke some record for swimming in the Yangtze River.
[00:54:43]  Don't ask me.
[00:54:44]  After having not been seen in public for like a year, he came out.
[00:54:47]  The first thing he did was jump and literally break China's record for swimming in the sea.
[00:54:51]  I believe it.
[00:54:52]  Until somebody proves it otherwise.
[00:54:55]  Let me tell you.
[00:54:55]  Let me tell you.
[00:54:57]  The man, man after my own heart, a little bit of a showman there.
[00:55:01]  Yeah, a little bit.
[00:55:02]  Must have been advised by the Kaifeng Jews there.
[00:55:07]  Yes.
[00:55:08]  And that I expected, of course.
[00:55:13]  But what I didn't expect was within, I guess, another few weeks, I can't remember now exactly how many weeks, what was called the Gang of Four was overthrown.
[00:55:28]  And believe it or not, I can even still remember their names from back then.
[00:55:34]  Zhang Jing, Zhang Zhengzhao, Yawen Yuan, and Yawen Yuan, Zhang Jing, Zhang Zheng Zhao, and I can't remember the four.
[00:55:47]  He'll come to me.
[00:55:49]  And then, of course, was a shock.
[00:55:54]  This guy, Hua Buo Feng, comes to power within a few more months.
[00:55:58]  He's displaced by Deng Xiaoping.
[00:56:01]  And then quickly everything is overturned.
[00:56:04]  Yep.
[00:56:06]  And I remember I would occasionally look at quote-unquote bourgeois periodicals.
[00:56:15]  And they would say things like, well, when Mao dies, Zhang Jungzhao, Zhang Jing, Yawen Yuan, and Wang Kong Wen, and Wang Kong Wen.
[00:56:27]  And Wang Kong, they're all going to be eliminated.
[00:56:30]  And the moderates are going to come to power.
[00:56:33]  And say, oh, that's all bourgeois bullshit.
[00:56:36]  You don't understand the revolution.
[00:56:38]  You don't understand Maoism.
[00:56:41]  Well, it was very sobering.
[00:56:44]  They got all the names right.
[00:56:47]  They got everything right.
[00:56:50]  I was an idiot.
[00:56:51]  I was an imbecile.
[00:56:54]  And I was bedridden for three weeks.
[00:57:01]  And it wasn't, believe me, the hard part was not being wrong.
[00:57:07]  Being wrong was, of course, shattering.
[00:57:12]  But much more shattering was I had made a fool of myself.
[00:57:18]  I wasn't just a Maoist.
[00:57:21]  I was a flagrant Maoist.
[00:57:24]  I would ridicule anyone who had any doubts about Maoism.
[00:57:30]  I remember I had a friend, Roy Friedman, and he said to me, Ah, Norman, by the time you get to China, there's going to be a McDonald's at the Great Wall.
[00:57:43]  Such bullshit.
[00:57:45]  Well, guess what?
[00:57:48]  There was a McDonald's at the Great Wall before I got to China.
[00:57:52]  Well, Norman, if it makes you feel any better, I'm still like that, and it's 2021.
[00:57:59]  So no matter how stupid you think you were, I am leagues dumber right now.
[00:58:07]  It was a mortifying experience for me.
[00:58:10]  And as I said, I was bedridden for three weeks.
[00:58:14]  I studied with the most famous Maoist intellectual of the time.
[00:58:19]  There were two really.
[00:58:20]  In the United States, it was Paul Sweezy, who was the editor of Monthly Review.
[00:58:26]  And in Paris, it was Charles Bettelheim.
[00:58:30]  And I was very close to Sweezy.
[00:58:32]  I love him.
[00:58:33]  He was just a wonderful human being, brilliant, and just a really nice guy.
[00:58:39]  And then I went to study with Charles Bettelheim in Paris.
[00:58:45]  And I was told when everything was overthrown in China, everything was reversed, he too had to be hospitalized over what happened.
[00:59:00]  The embarrassment, the humiliation.
[00:59:04]  And then I wasn't going to be a fool again.
[00:59:09]  So I looked around.
[00:59:12]  I was pretty lost.
[00:59:14]  I was astray.
[00:59:17]  I didn't finish Princeton at the time because I couldn't think of a thesis topic.
[00:59:22]  I was going to do a thesis on the transition, what was called back then, the theory of the transition to socialism.
[00:59:29]  But now I didn't think socialism was going to be transited to anymore after what happened in China.

=== Points of Unity (03:56) ===

[00:59:39]  And eventually, I guess it was 1975 or six.
[00:59:47]  I read there was this two-volume work put out by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky on the Vietnam War and other U.S. interventions.
[01:00:00]  And I became enamored of Chomsky, not just because of his sheer brilliance.
[01:00:09]  I liked the method.
[01:00:11]  The method was, or seemed to be, ideology-free.
[01:00:16]  And it was just give me the facts and let's reason through the facts and let's see where that leads us.
[01:00:22]  That's how Chomsky's method appeared to me.
[01:00:27]  And I had at this point soured on ideology because of my own personal experience of ideology having blinded me to some pretty obvious facts, or at least discernible facts, that I refused to see.
[01:00:48]  So now I was going to look for some kind of ideologically free way of apprehending the world.
[01:00:59]  And I start to read Chomsky closely, very closely.
[01:01:06]  And the next major event was June 82.
[01:01:11]  Israel invades Lebanon.
[01:01:15]  Very murderous invasion.
[01:01:18]  The estimates are the war, the Israeli attack lasted from June 5th till September 82.
[01:01:27]  The estimates are between 15 and 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed.
[01:01:34]  Overwhelmingly, of course, civilians.
[01:01:37]  And the Sabri and Shetila massacres.
[01:01:40]  Sabri and Shatila comes at the very end of the war.
[01:01:44]  It wasn't really a war.
[01:01:45]  It was the invasion.
[01:01:47]  That comes very end.
[01:01:49]  And it was many, you know, in many ways, it was just kind of a blip on the screen because the estimates are between 1 and 2,000 people were killed in the camps.
[01:02:00]  But overall, that could be just about 1 tenth of the total people killed.
[01:02:06]  In any event, I joined this group called Jamal, Jews Against the Israeli Massacre in Lebanon.
[01:02:15]  It was probably apart from the Israeli invasion itself, it was probably the second biggest disaster of the war, our group.
[01:02:27]  It was composed mostly of Jewish meshubas, complete lunatics, losers, outliers, certifiably insane people.
[01:02:43]  I can hear many of our Jewish listeners being like, oh, he's talking about me.
[01:02:49]  Exactly.
[01:02:50]  Exactly.
[01:02:53]  And one of the key questions back then, we had to have what were called points of unity.
[01:03:00]  What are our points of unity?
[01:03:02]  Believe me, I have been involved in working out those before.
[01:03:05]  It is not a pleasant experience for anybody.
[01:03:08]  So, you know, point of unity number one, we support Palestinian self-determination, point unity number two, U.S. out of the Middle East, point of unity number three, Israel out of Lebanon.
[01:03:21]  And then comes this key point.
[01:03:24]  Where do we stand on Zionism?
[01:03:28]  Where do we stand on Zionism?
[01:03:31]  Well, I was the recalcitrant.

=== Zionism And Morning Propaganda (14:03) ===

[01:03:35]  I wasn't going to do, if I might call it, a Maoism too.
[01:03:42]  I'm not going to now go on the anti-Zionism bandwagon.
[01:03:47]  First of all, because I didn't like being, I didn't like taking an ideological position anymore.
[01:03:54]  I felt uncomfortable after the Maoism phase.
[01:03:58]  Secondly, I respect knowledge.
[01:04:02]  I hadn't read anything on Zionism.
[01:04:05]  I'm not going to take a position on something I don't know about.
[01:04:09]  I'm not going through this blind fanatic phase again.
[01:04:13]  I need to read about it.
[01:04:14]  Though I want to be absolutely clear, I read everything there was to read about China.
[01:04:20]  In fact, I taught a section on China as an undergraduate at my college.
[01:04:28]  I knew more than any professor.
[01:04:31]  Okay, I take that back.
[01:04:34]  I knew more, I knew enough, I knew enough to be assigned a section of the class, a section of the course to teach on China.
[01:04:44]  So I always read.
[01:04:47]  And I wasn't going to become a Zionist or an anti-Zionist unless I knew what the subject was about.
[01:04:56]  So I started to read and read and read until I decided, hey, what the hell?
[01:05:04]  I'm going to make this my doctoral dissertation.
[01:05:06]  I told you I didn't finish because I couldn't think of a thesis topic.
[01:05:12]  So that became my thesis topic.
[01:05:16]  And what happened was the following.
[01:05:22]  It's 1984.
[01:05:25]  I had finished writing my doctoral dissertation, the draft, the final draft.
[01:05:30]  It was done.
[01:05:31]  I was just about to submit it when I walk into what was called back then Harper and Rowe bookstore, the publisher Harper and Row, now I think it's called Harper's.
[01:05:45]  Harper College.
[01:05:46]  I walk into their bookstore and I see on the shelf this volume called From Time Immemorial, The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
[01:06:01]  I forgot the subtitle now.
[01:06:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:06:04]  And I turned it around to see the blurbs and had a very impressive roster of blurbs from top people.
[01:06:16]  And they say, this history, this book is going to change our understanding of the whole Arab-Israeli conflict.
[01:06:24]  This book is a milestone.
[01:06:30]  And it said, everything we know about the conflict, this book proves it's not true.
[01:06:40]  And to tell you the truth, at that moment it got seized with trepidation.
[01:06:49]  I thought, uh-oh, am I doing the Maoism too now?
[01:06:54]  That the Palestinians are all fake.
[01:06:59]  Everything Israel said is true.
[01:07:02]  Because the main thesis of the book was Palestine was empty when the Jews came.
[01:07:11]  The Jewish settlers built up Palestine, made it economically thrive.
[01:07:20]  Made the desert bloom.
[01:07:21]  Right.
[01:07:22]  And then all the Arabs from neighboring countries surreptitiously entered Palestine because of the new economic opportunities created by the Jews.
[01:07:35]  And they pretended to be Palestinian.
[01:07:39]  Like that they just like the thesis was that a bunch of Palestinians, that people who had been indigenous to the land for thousands of years, had actually just like, you know, picked up their belongings and come overnight from Jordan in the beginning of the 20th century because the Jews had done such a good job.
[01:07:56]  Yes, that was the thesis.
[01:07:57]  This was a thesis taken seriously by like everyone.
[01:08:01]  Like, I mean, it was, it was, this book was taken.
[01:08:03]  It was, it was, I mean, who was, who was celebrating this book?
[01:08:06]  Well, you wouldn't know the people now because we're talking about 40 years ago, but some of them you would know.
[01:08:13]  There was Lucy DeWittowich, an eminent Jewish historian from the right.
[01:08:18]  There was Elie Wiesel.
[01:08:20]  Sure.
[01:08:22]  Yeah.
[01:08:22]  There was.
[01:08:25]  He was the elevator sexual harasser guy, right?
[01:08:28]  Yeah.
[01:08:29]  I don't know if it was elevator or thing, but I mean, he's a bad writer and a right-wing fanatic.
[01:08:35]  Yeah.
[01:08:36]  Yeah.
[01:08:36]  Oh, I'm familiar.
[01:08:37]  I'm familiar with that.
[01:08:38]  Is that your original copy of the book?
[01:08:40]  Yes.
[01:08:40]  Holy shit.
[01:08:41]  Could you hold that up to the camera?
[01:08:43]  Sorry, I would love to.
[01:08:44]  It's a museum item now.
[01:08:46]  Oh, my gosh.
[01:08:46]  My God.
[01:08:47]  Yeah.
[01:08:49]  There was Barbara Tuchman, who was a renowned historian at the time.
[01:08:53]  There was Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate in literature.
[01:08:59]  I read a couple of his books.
[01:09:01]  So I got really scared that maybe this is true.
[01:09:07]  And I just had the wool pulled over my eyes a second time.
[01:09:16]  That this was like my Maoism.
[01:09:20]  What happened was when the book came out, the people of the left, if we could call it that, they all just dismissed it as, oh, that's Zionist propaganda, ignoring Zionist propaganda.
[01:09:39]  But I remembered when I looked at that article that said, Zhang Jing, Yawen Yuan, Wang Heng Wen, and Zhang Zhengzhao, they're all going to be eliminated after Mao dies.
[01:09:59]  And I said, oh, that's just bourgeois propaganda.
[01:10:04]  I remember thinking, this sounds like me.
[01:10:08]  When they were saying, oh, that's just Zionist propaganda.
[01:10:11]  Yeah.
[01:10:12]  And I thought, maybe what she's saying is true.
[01:10:17]  So I sat down.
[01:10:19]  I was working in an after-school program for kids in an inner city community.
[01:10:28]  I would, in the morning, go to the library.
[01:10:30]  It was after school.
[01:10:31]  It was from 2 to 6.
[01:10:33]  I would go in the morning to the library.
[01:10:37]  And after work, I would go to the library.
[01:10:40]  And I started to check through the footnotes.
[01:10:44]  And the footnotes, according to Peters, I never actually counted.
[01:10:48]  There were 1,852 footnotes.
[01:10:56]  And let's see.
[01:10:58]  In the book, they stretch from pages 443 to.
[01:11:06]  Yeah, I mean, for listeners who are maybe not familiar with Mr. Finkelstein's work, intimately, he is the footnote sniper.
[01:11:16]  Like, don't try to trip him up on the footnotes.
[01:11:18]  It stretches 443 to 563.
[01:11:22]  120 pages of footnotes.
[01:11:24]  And I start to go through it one by one by one by one.
[01:11:28]  I want to know if this is true.
[01:11:31]  Once bitten, twice shy.
[01:11:35]  I'm not going to be humiliated again.
[01:11:38]  I told you, the worst part of what happened with my Maoism is not that I was wrong, but I had made a complete fool of myself.
[01:11:47]  And I wasn't going to be made the fool of a second time.
[01:11:51]  God, I wish I could.
[01:11:52]  So when Professor Said said, ah, it's bourgeois propaganda, I wasn't ready to accept that.
[01:12:03]  I wanted to know for myself.
[01:12:06]  And then the book contains an appendix which corresponds to a couple of textual chapters which attempts to prove demographically her thesis that the place was empty.
[01:12:26]  The demographic study in the book, it comes with a blur, comes with a page certifying the findings by a fellow named Philip Hauser, who was the head of population studies at the University of Chicago.
[01:12:46]  It's an ominous string of words right there, considering what the University of Chicago is known for.
[01:12:51]  That is a serious pedigree.
[01:12:54]  It's a serious credential.
[01:12:56]  And what did I know about demography?
[01:12:59]  He headed up the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago.
[01:13:05]  So there was this demographic study, which corresponded to textual chapters that explained the study.
[01:13:15]  I came home.
[01:13:16]  I didn't believe then.
[01:13:18]  I still don't believe in any mechanical devices.
[01:13:21]  I took out my pad, I took out my pencil, and every night I'd lie down in bed.
[01:13:29]  I lived in this small, cavernous, Dostoevsky-like apartment.
[01:13:35]  Wait, how is it small and cavernous?
[01:13:38]  Well, I meant like dark.
[01:13:40]  Really dig.
[01:13:41]  Yeah, okay.
[01:13:41]  I was like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:13:43]  Cave-like.
[01:13:45]  Perfect for an academic.
[01:13:49]  The mice and the cockroaches were not perfect.
[01:13:55]  Traditional allies of the Jewish people.
[01:13:57]  At least not one who grew up in the Jewish home.
[01:14:00]  Yes.
[01:14:02]  And every night I'm calculating.
[01:14:06]  I'm calculating.
[01:14:07]  I'm calculating.
[01:14:08]  I'm going to understand this.
[01:14:10]  I'm going to understand this.
[01:14:13]  I had gone through this already when I read for the first time when I was 18, Marxist Capital.
[01:14:21]  I'm going to understand this.
[01:14:25]  And I'm flipping the pages and flipping the pages and flipping the pages and flipping the pages.
[01:14:30]  And then one night, it was like 1 a.m.
[01:14:35]  And I got this chill down my spine.
[01:14:37]  I feel it now.
[01:14:39]  I feel it now.
[01:14:40]  I got this chill.
[01:14:40]  I do too, brother.
[01:14:42]  And I said, oh my God, that number is a fake.
[01:14:48]  That number is a fake.
[01:14:51]  I'm sure.
[01:14:52]  I'm sure of it.
[01:14:54]  It was like, oh, my God.
[01:14:57]  I remember later when I told the story to Paul Sweezy, he said to me, Norm, for a scholar, there's nothing like that eureka moment.
[01:15:09]  And I had that eureka moment.
[01:15:12]  I got up from my bed.
[01:15:15]  My heart is palpitating.
[01:15:18]  And I start walking, pacing my apartment back and forth, back and forth.
[01:15:24]  And I'm saying, I did it!
[01:15:26]  I did it!
[01:15:28]  I did it!
[01:15:30]  I found a hoax!
[01:15:32]  It was unbelievable that moment.
[01:15:35]  I cannot tell you what that was like.
[01:15:39]  And then, what do I do?
[01:15:41]  It's 1 a.m.
[01:15:43]  What do I do?
[01:15:44]  Well, I'm Jewish.
[01:15:46]  I called my mother.
[01:15:55]  I said, did you wake her up?
[01:15:58]  I said, Mom, I did it!
[01:16:01]  I did it!
[01:16:02]  I did it!
[01:16:04]  She said, Norm, I'm so proud of you.
[01:16:06]  What did you do?
[01:16:11]  You know, at one o'clock in the morning, I'm not going to explain to her how I proved the demographic study.
[01:16:21]  You're like, so there's this book called Time Mario.
[01:16:25]  Norman, would you get a job already?
[01:16:30]  A real job.
[01:16:33]  Well, little did she know.
[01:16:35]  This definitely turned into something.
[01:16:38]  So, and I didn't want to leave off with that because I have to get to work tonight.
[01:16:44]  But that was like the beginning of a whole new chapter in my life.
[01:16:48]  What happened was I wrote up my findings.
[01:16:53]  I sent out my findings to 25 people.
[01:16:59]  It was obviously, you know, long before computers and email, you put it in, you Xerox it, you put it in an envelope.
[01:17:08]  And of the 25 people I sent it, I sent it out to people who would normally be interested in something like that.
[01:17:17]  And Edward Saeed, you know, people, prominent people involved in the Israel-Palestine question.
[01:17:25]  And one morning, it was a Saturday morning, I'm pretty sure, I get a call and the person says, is this Norman Finkelstein?
[01:17:37]  I said, yeah.

=== Norman Finkelstein's Call (05:03) ===

[01:17:38]  He said, well, my name is Noam Chomsky.
[01:17:44]  I was totally bewildered.
[01:17:48]  He said, I read what you wrote, and it sounds plausible.
[01:17:53]  And I think you should continue researching because you'll probably find there is more than what you already found.
[01:18:02]  And that began a whole new chapter in my life where I became no longer a disciple of Chair and Mao, but I became a disciple of Chairman Noam.
[01:18:19]  And it had a After my parents, it was the most decisive relationship of my life.
[01:18:29]  And I wasn't a groupie.
[01:18:34]  I was old school.
[01:18:36]  You have to earn your relationship to him.
[01:18:39]  And earning it meant to maintain his standards of, beyond all else, his standards of productivity.
[01:18:48]  I had to work hard.
[01:18:51]  And I have to be good at what I did to earn his, I wouldn't say respect.
[01:19:00]  I don't think he ever respected me.
[01:19:01]  And I don't think that's a big problem for me.
[01:19:04]  Chomsky operates in a totally different level.
[01:19:11]  And he respects two things.
[01:19:19]  First of all, he does respect personal sacrifice.
[01:19:22]  If you made personal sacrifice for a cause, he respects that.
[01:19:27]  And that part of it, he respected me, I think.
[01:19:31]  Well, you certainly fulfilled that criterion.
[01:19:35]  And the other thing is he respects math and science.
[01:19:39]  He considers himself a scientist.
[01:19:42]  And for him, what's called the social studies, it doesn't have any intellectual content.
[01:19:48]  I remember once I had a conversation with him.
[01:19:51]  I said, you know, I'm reading this stuff on Zionism.
[01:19:55]  I'm reading all these theories and literature.
[01:20:02]  And I said, it doesn't feel like it has any intellectual depth.
[01:20:07]  I said, well, what do you think?
[01:20:09]  And he said to me, well, let's start from the beginning.
[01:20:13]  I don't think anything in the social sciences has any intellectual depth.
[01:20:18]  Which, of course, made me feel terrific.
[01:20:21]  I would agree with you.
[01:20:22]  I don't know much about it, but I'm a feelings guy.
[01:20:29]  So are the social sciences, actually.
[01:20:32]  I became, I worked very hard.
[01:20:36]  I worked very hard.
[01:20:38]  I upheld my principles.
[01:20:40]  I would never have been first rank because I don't have the natural gifts for first rank.
[01:20:50]  But I certainly would not have ended up how I ended up, which is I never had a job.
[01:20:56]  It's a very sobering fact.
[01:20:57]  I'm 67 now.
[01:21:01]  I never had a job.
[01:21:02]  I worked as an adjunct.
[01:21:04]  I worked part-time.
[01:21:08]  Only five years, 2001 to 2006, I earned $50,000 a year for five years.
[01:21:20]  After 2007, I never worked again.
[01:21:23]  Not even adjunct.
[01:21:24]  Nobody, nothing.
[01:21:26]  I mean, I literally, and I'm not asking for pity.
[01:21:29]  I'm just describing facts.
[01:21:31]  Yeah.
[01:21:31]  I literally could not volunteer in a high school.
[01:21:36]  I went back to my high school, James Madison, and I said, look, I'll volunteer.
[01:21:40]  Because I felt like being in the classroom.
[01:21:41]  I missed it.
[01:21:43]  No.
[01:21:44]  Nothing.
[01:21:45]  No.
[01:21:46]  Why is that?
[01:21:47]  Because I was blacklisted and there was no way.
[01:21:50]  I don't think people understand.
[01:21:52]  Okay, I don't want to say people don't understand.
[01:21:54]  That's all.
[01:21:54]  It's an obnoxious expression.
[01:21:57]  You have to experience it to see what happens.
[01:22:00]  Yeah.
[01:22:00]  So I have become known as a Holocaust denier.
[01:22:04]  Was one of the things they would hurl at me.
[01:22:06]  Well, we
[01:22:37]  will be back with part two this week.

=== Fingers Fucking Crossed (02:19) ===

[01:22:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:22:43]  Fingers fucking crossed.
[01:22:45]  There's no technical difficulties or anything.
[01:22:46]  But yeah, that was, I very much enjoyed conducting that interview.
[01:22:52]  Or really, what I did was essentially just interrupt Norman Finkelstein with stupid things I was thinking.
[01:22:59]  But I consider it conducting in a way.
[01:23:01]  It's hard not to want to chime in because he's so cozy.
[01:23:05]  Yeah.
[01:23:05]  Cozy guy.
[01:23:06]  Very cozy.
[01:23:07]  Yeah.
[01:23:07]  Very friendly.
[01:23:08]  Like it was very, I felt very like he gave it was a very warm, warm feeling that I got listening to him.
[01:23:15]  I do want to say, listeners, he literally brought out the original, his copy of From Time Immemorial.
[01:23:22]  Yeah.
[01:23:23]  All these like post-its sticking out of it.
[01:23:24]  It was like totally worn.
[01:23:26]  Unreal.
[01:23:26]  Yeah.
[01:23:27]  Totally.
[01:23:28]  He wasn't lying when he called it a museum piece either.
[01:23:30]  I'll be bidding on it.
[01:23:32]  Absolutely.
[01:23:33]  Absolutely.
[01:23:33]  I'll be bidding against Brace for it.
[01:23:35]  Yeah.
[01:23:36]  Well, I'll probably hire some Chinese firms to do the, I never bid on anything on eBay, but I understand that you can bid a penny more than somebody using some sort of robot.
[01:23:45]  And for our listeners who are new to Finkel lore, they soon will come to understand just how important that copy of his book, of that book is.
[01:23:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:23:55]  And we'll put a list of books that he's written sort of in the description and stuff.
[01:24:00]  I've been rereading the Holocaust industry to sort of get ready for this.
[01:24:04]  And let me tell you, it's a good book.
[01:24:05]  And he writes like he talks too.
[01:24:07]  I mean, the man is, he is, he's an intellectual.
[01:24:12]  Yeah.
[01:24:12]  And we'll get into all that stuff in the coming interview.
[01:24:17]  Well, my name, unfortunately, is Brace Belden.
[01:24:20]  I'm Liz.
[01:24:22]  I'm Noah Colwyn.
[01:24:23]  We are, of course, joined by Young Chomsky.
[01:24:28]  So you just do this now.
[01:24:29]  You just do this now?
[01:24:31]  I don't know.
[01:24:32]  But I almost just said Noam Chomsky, too, which is funny.
[01:24:35]  I know, yeah.
[01:24:36]  Oh, before, oh, I think before he did, he did ask our producer, he was like, are you young Chomsky?
[01:24:45]  Or who is Young Chomsky?
[01:24:46]  That was very cute.
[01:24:47]  Oh, that was very sweet.
[01:24:49]  Yeah, it was very sweet.
[01:24:50]  I was like, oh, maybe there's a little connection there.
[01:24:52]  Yeah.
[01:24:53]  Oh, you should see this little bastard smile right now.
[01:24:56]  A very toothy smile come from Young Chomsky.
[01:24:59]  Well, we'll see you next time.
[01:25:01]  Bye-bye!