Norman Gary Finkelstein ( FING-kəl-steen; born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein was born to parents who are both Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City in 1953. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2006, the department and college committees at DePaul University voted to tenure Finkelstein, but he was not granted tenure, and he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on largely undisclosed terms.Finkelstein rose to prominence in 2000 after writing his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he claims that some exploit the memory of the Holocaust as an "ideological weapon" to provide Israel "immunity to criticism". A critic of Israel, he was denied entry to Israel and banned from entering the country for ten years in 2008. Finkelstein has called Israel the "Jewish supremacist state", and views it as committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people. Through personal accounts in one of his books, he compares the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation with the horrors of the Nazis. Finkelstein's latest book on Palestine and Israel is Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. Source: Wikipedia (en)