Who’s Afraid of Holocaust Denial?

by Norman Finkelstein

This excerpt appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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The following is an excerpt of the chapter "Who's Afraid of Holocaust Denial?" from Norman Finkelstein's new book I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (Sublation Press, 2023).

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NOTE: For best reading, open the Endnotes in another tab. The chapter's original footnotes, given in parentheses throughout, are reproduced there.

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The author in Brooklyn.

Inspired as I still am by the radical convictions of my youth, I am resolutely conventional in my opinion of what should and shouldn’t happen in the classroom. The 1915 inaugural statement of principles by the staid American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.) strikes the right chords:¹

The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.. . .The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.