Fitting for the soft-liberal and thoroughly contradictory, uncritical politics of New York's youngish chattering inhabitants (who, tellingly, only seem to read the magazine's restaurant section, anyway), New York Magazine has printed a one-page hatchet job concerning NE hero Norman Finkelstein, who is currently trying to rebuild his career following a recent character assassination campaign (led, of course, by Alan Fucking Dershowitz), which cost him his job at Chicago's DePaul University. Ben Harris's 'article' about Finkelstein (which artfully manages to evade ANY FUCKING ENGAGEMENT WHATSOEVER with Finkelstein's work), is entitled 'Beached' (referring to Finkelstein's recent move to his deceased father's apartment in Coney Island), and sub-titled 'The Coney Island exile of a scholar who would be Noam Chomsky, but isn't.' Your guess is as good as ours as to what the fuck this phrase means. But let's move beyond pithy linguistic arguments; there's (barely) enough here that warrants a more polemic response.
Harris, at best a thoroughly shitty writer, does nothing to mask his contempt of what he blatantly considers to be the pathetic nature of Finkelstein's (personal, political, academic) life at present:
His days are now spent in solitary scholarly pursuits; his bookshelves buckle under the weight of tomes by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Notes of support from his students sit on a piano; there’s a photo of him and Noam Chomsky (“my closest friend”) bare-chested on the beach at Cape Cod.
Apparently, for Harris, Finkelstein's students are woefully misguided, yet serve the purpose of consoling Finkelstein following the Dershowitz-orchestrated come-uppance he so obviously deserved. And Noam Chomsky? Harris takes Finkelstein for a deluded fool--if you two are so close, where's your buddy Noam now?
We're surprised we've taken up this much space dealing with Harris's diarrheal diatribe. Read it, or don't. Judging by his own journalistic standards, dealing with primary sources is probably not too high on Harris's to-do list.
Ben Harris: fuck you.
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6 comments:
i thought harris wrote descriptively without making any real judgments.
i think you are out of line in your harsh attacks on the writer, especially at the end of your post.
the picture harris paints is bittersweet, because dr. finkelstein is in a poor situation. it's pathetique, not pathetic.
strictly in re: to writing, you make very strong claims and take no pains to situate what you are saying in the text.
we will admit that we were harsh on harris, and that this post was written as soon as we had read his piece, and as well that it was written in a rage, but that doesn't spare harris from being called out on a few things.
it's true that harris did not make any explicit judgments, but his bias is clear enough.
harris was condescending and his article lacked any sort of context. saying harris wrote 'descriptively' --poorly, at that--glosses over any number of things.
there's no engagement whatsoever with finkelstein's academic work, aside from a few one-liners that serve more to ridicule/caricature finkelstein than give his work the attention it deserves.
his relationship with noam chomsky serves alternately as a "claim to fame" and as a sort of bogeyman, the assumption being that finkelstein lusts after chomsky's status but just can't cut it; a corollary of this assumption is that chomsky is "chomsky" because he's played the academic game, not been as outspoken as finkelstein, etc., which is blatantly ridiculous.
this sentence is particularly silly: "His days are now spent in solitary scholarly pursuits; his bookshelves buckle under the weight of tomes by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky." what inference is the reader of this article to make? "oh, yeah, marxist analysis, socialist politics, blah blah blah, this poor bastard can't give it up." maybe we're reading too much into this; the very fact of an article about norman finkelstein in new york magazine, however, raises too many red flags.
harris is, at best, even-handed, but it's not enough to stop there. something about this article just reeks of the same "liberal", uncritical politics that dominate mainstream american media regarding israel/palestine. and saying that finkelstein is in a "poor situation" completely obscures the fact that he's lost his job due to undue outside pressure by explicitly biased parties (i.e., allen motherfucking dershowitz).
also, the 'invisible hand' reminds one of us of washington, dc.
If you visit my blog, Tikun Olam, you'll find 3 or 4 posts I've written about Harris' work at JTA which I generally feel is substandard when it deals with the Israeli Palestinian conflict or anything considered partisan in Jewish politics. He, & JTA, clearly have the politics of the mainstream (conservative) Jewish organizations at heart in their approach to people like Finkelstein.
I've criticized Harris for refusing to provide balance in an article attacking Haaretz journalist Danny Rubinstein for using the phrase "apartheid" in describing Israeli Occupation policy. And that was just one article--I've commented on several he's written.
In fact, JTA managing editor Ami Eden has accused me of being a liar for claiming that JTA refused to apologize for passing on a fake quote attributed to Desmond Tutu equating Israel to Hitler. Harris' article attempting to clarify this story was also disappointing.
Pls. keep in touch if you find other stories by Harris worth reviewing.
BTW, I would never associate the words which conclude yr post w. my view of Harris as a journalist. But I certainly do feel disappointement & even anger at his refusal to provide balanced coverage of figures like Norman Finkelstein & others who dissent fr. the Jewish communal party line on Israel & other issues.
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``That was my fear, initially, she said, putting her arms around hiswaist. He asked us to follow him backand then had my wife get up on a table like they would use in ahospital.
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