Norman Finkelstein was born on December 8, Brooklyn, New York City in 1953 to Holocaust survivors Mary and Zacharias Finkelstein. Finkelstein's parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. His father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, and then emigrated to the United States, where his father became a factory worker and his mother a homemaker and later a bookkeeper. Finkelstein's mother was an ardent pacifist.
Finkelstein has said of his parents that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on".
Finkelstein grew up in Borough Park, then Mill Basin, both in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. In his memoir he recalls strongly identifying with the outrage that his mother, who witnessed the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage the United States wrought in the Vietnam War.
He attended James Madison High School followed by Binghamton College, where he graduated in 1974 with a degree in History. Finkelstein enrolled at Princeton University where he earned a Master's degree in political science and a PhD in political studies in 1988. He also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.
As a young man, Finkelstein identified as a Maoist and worked for The Guardian, a Maoist newsweekly. After the 1981 trial of the Gang of Four, Finkelstein had a falling out with Maoist politics.
Following this experience, Finkelstein decided to develop his worldview with meticulous scholarship. Finkelstein recounts spending an entire summer in the New York Public Library comparing historical population records of Palestine to the claims made in the Joan Peters Zionist text "From Time Immemorial".
Finkelstein's work largely debunked the text, which was well-regarded at the time, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 1985. Finkelstein's skepticism of scholarship regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict would continue to characterize his academic career.
In 2003, Alan Dershowitz published "The Case for Israel", which Finkelstein called "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense". Dershowitz began campaigning to block Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul University. In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University. In response, Finkelstein resigned, and students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in protest.
In 2008, Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel. In 2009, a documentary film about Finkelstein's life and career was published, titled "American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein".
"My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies."
- Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein - Israel and Palestine
An Unpopular Man - Norman Finkelstein, TNR 
FINKELSTEIN: Misadventures in the Class Struggle - 
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