Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953, in New York City to Jewish Holocaust survivor parents—his father from Poland, mother from Germany) is an American political scientist, historian, author, and activist. Raised in a working-class Brooklyn family, he earned a B.A. from Binghamton University (1974), an M.A. (1980), and a Ph.D. from Princeton University (1988) with a dissertation on Zionism. He has taught at institutions including Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was denied tenure in 2007 amid political pressure from pro-Israel groups, including a public feud with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein is renowned for his critical scholarship on the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is an outspoken critic of Israeli policies and its U.S. supporters, as well as organizations like MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), with whom he has an adversarial relationship, and he has criticized Jewish organizations' use of Holocaust memory. He gained prominence with his 2000 book 'The Holocaust Industry,' which argues that Holocaust memory has been commodified and exploited for political gain to suppress criticism of Israel, drawing both acclaim and accusations of antisemitism (which he denies, framing his work as anti-Zionist). Other notable works include 'Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict' (1995), 'The Rise and Fall of Palestine' (1996), 'Beyond Chutzpah' (2005), which critiques figures like Alan Dershowitz, and 'Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom' (2018), which argues that Israel's actions in the occupied territories violate international law. Unlike many in the pro-Palestinian movement, Finkelstein remains a staunch advocate for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, causing occasional friction with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Since leaving academia, he works as an independent scholar, lecturer, and adjunct professor, with a global following for his Palestinian rights activism, while facing deplatforming, professional ostracism, and academic controversies over his polarizing views.