Dear Dr Finkelstein.
I am a Pakistani Muslim and have heard many of your talks on google videos and YouTube, most of them more than once.
Unlike you, I do believe that if indeed there is a chosen people, it is the Jews. I do not believe in this “choseness” in the sense of their being essentially better, but I do see something special in them. For me, what sets them apart from most other groups of people is their well demonstrated fortitude through history with which they combated during an unending series of tragedies and persecutions, which is unique to them as a people. I believe that any other people in similar circumstances would have ceased to exist as a people. Theirs is a unique story of faith bringing a people through endless travails. I also believe that as a proportion of their total population, no other people have contributed so much to arts and sciences, liberal and humanitarian causes, and most especially in their commitment to truth and serving the cause of truth. Towards this latter cause people like you and Dr Chomsky etc. are the exemplars.
In my view the essential cause of their suffering was the view of history, bolstered by the Church, that they were responsible for Jesus being crucified. Around this basic charge various other charges were laid from time to time as suited the powers that be, but this is what seemed to be the essential glue of antisemitism in Christian lands. With the coming into being of the nation state, another charge was manufactured and heaped against the Jews i.e that they were a people of divided loyalties whose primary loyalties were not with the states they inhabited.
For some years now, as it is being increasingly suspected that AIPAC and other such organizations are skewing US foreign policy in favour of Israel and against the essential interests of the U.S–and especially as Iraq seems to be becoming a quagmire and as more Americans die there–an incipient feeling seems to be getting hold of the imagination of Americans that all is perhaps not right , and that perhaps the first loyalty of American Jews is not towards the U.S, but towards Israel. Since you have written a book on the subject of the attitudes of the next generation of Jews growing up in the U.S, I wonder whether US Jewry is conscious of this subtle change of perception among mainstream Christian America. And do they debate its consequences?
Additionally, however, there is an aspect of their history which makes the jews “exceptional” rather than “chosen”, which you among many seem to have missed is their exploitation of the utterly unconscionable tragedy of the holocaust. And this is their brutal treatment of Palestinian Muslims, despite the fact that through history Jews received better treatment at the hands of Muslims, than they did at the hands of any other peoples. Further, reading Johnathan Cook, one becomes aware that the Jews of Israel are drifting towards bigotry and apartheid which is leading towards increasing dehumanization of the Palestinians, and a slow genocide against them is gaining ground. If steps are not taken to check this trend, it should be feared that not far into the future, they may visit the horrors of a full genocide which they learned at the knees of the Nazis.
This is a subject which needs at least a comment if not extended treatment from erudite and highly respected historians like you.