Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History

Finkelstein lays into the human rights record of Israel and attacks Alan Dershowitz for poor scholarship. In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein moves from an iconoclastic interrogation of the new anti-Semitism to a meticulously researched expose of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Pointing to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record, Finkelstein argues that so much controversy continues to swirl around the conflict because apologists for Israel contrive it. Examining the spread of distortions masquerading as history, Finkelstein scrutinizes the most recent addition to this genre, Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel and, setting Dershowitz's assertions on Israel's human rights record against the findings of the mainstream human rights community, finds that Dershowitz has systematically misrepresented the facts.