Norman Finkelstein, professor of political science at DePaul University and controversial author of The Holocaust Industry as well as Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, spoke last Wednesday at the University of California-Davis. His lecture took place as part of the Muslim Students Association’s Justice Week; Finkelstein was invited by the MSA.

[Finkelstein] will give a talk titled “Israel and Palestine: The Roots of Conflict, Prospects for Peace” at 8 p.m. in 194 Chemistry.

Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has been accused by some as being a Holocaust denier. Author of several books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Finkelstein has argued that the Holocaust has been over-exploited for pro-Israel means.

[MSA organizer Amir] Asifuddin defended Finkelstein, saying he is not a Holocaust denier. Additionally, Asifuddin encouraged students to come to the talk to draw their own conclusions.

“No matter what your political views are or what your preconceptions about Finkelstein are, listen to what he has to say and then make a decision,” he said.

The week-long event is designed to highlight injustice throughout the world. In addition to Finkelstein, it included a discussion of U.S. detentions of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a lecture by human-rights activist Leisa Faulkner Barnes on the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and an lecture focusing on the situation in Iraq.

In regards to the week’s title, Asifuddin said, “It’s really a twist on the word. You aren’t going to see any justice at these events.”

As part of its sixth-annual Project Preservation, the Dartmouth University Hillel will be sending 14 students of various religious denominations to Lithuania to help restore a Jewish cemetary in the town of Yurburg. Returning trip attendee Zoe Dmitrovsky will be co-leading this year’s trip and will be joined by her roommate, Juliet Coffey, who is Irish-Catholic.

“My experience last year was incredible, and I really fell in love with the project,” Dmitrovsky said. “It was so powerful to me to look around at the different faces and know that not everyone was Jewish but we were all there for the same reason. Everyone was there to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.”

This is the first year that Project Preservation travels to Lithuania. The first four groups worked on cemeteries in Belarus, while last year’s group traveled to Druzhkapol, Ukraine. Before spending five days in Yurburg, the group will visit Krakow, Poland to tour the site of Auschwitz concentration camp, as well as Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania.

Once in Yurburg, students will clean, document and create a map of headstones in the cemetery. They also plan to erect a fence around the site and hold a dedication ceremony with local and regional authorities after the project’s completion. Rabbi Edward Boraz, executive director of Dartmouth Hillel, will accompany the students on the trip.

The annual trip began after an Albany, New York, dentist visited a rundown cemetary in his family’s native Belarus. Returning to America, he presented a proposal to the Tucker Foundation to return and clean up the site. The foundation then developed the program so students could be included.

Northwestern University hosted “Silenced Voices: A Genocide Survivor Panel” this past Tuesday, sponsored by the campus Hillel along with the Sheil Catholic Center, Northwestern University Darfur Action Committee and NUnite. With approximately 200 people in attendance, the panel featured speeches on the Aremenian genocide during World War I through the present genocide in Darfur.

The stories of personal loss and survival began with activist Greg Bedian’s account of his grandmother’s hardship during the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians died under the persecution of the government of the Ottoman Empire.

Leon Lim, co-founder of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, spoke of his years living under the campaign of terror conducted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia beginning in 1975.

One panelist, Jacqueline Murekatete, discussed the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Most of her family was murdered during the attempt by the Hutu-led government to purge the country of Tutsis, Murekatete’s ethnic group.

A fellow panelist who travels with Murekatete to speak at schools across the U.S., David Gewirtzman, told his stories from the Holocaust. Raised a Jew in the small Polish town of Losice, he watched as his community was brutalized by the invading Nazis. After surviving a labor camp at Treblinka, Gewirtzman said he returned there as an adult to face the genocide’s legacy.

“They had a tall monument and around it, 2,000 smaller stones,” he said. “Each stone was a town that sent people to the camp, and I found the one for Losice. Out of the 8,000 Jews in the ghetto there at the beginning, only 16 of us came back. Eight thousand people, and that stone is all that’s left.”

The final panelist, Darfur survivor Abrahim Adam, said his family was scattered by the vicious Arab militias backed by the Sudanese government, with his 15 siblings divided among six refugee camps.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who is often criticised as being too right-wing in his support for Israeli policies, spoke at Stanford University last week. The focus of his lecture was the deterioration of dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly on college campuses, where he said “name-calling, dehumanization, [and] polemics” had replaced legitimate debate.

“That’s not at all conducive to peace. All I’m doing today is calling for nuance. I’m calling for an improvement in the debate.”

Through a 50-minute speech and 40-minute question-and-answer session, Dershowitz offered a measured criticism of Israeli policy while strongly arguing that the Jewish state was being unfairly singled out for criticism among its neighbors in the region.

In his lecture, Dershowitz was especially pointed in his disdain for campus divestment campaigns, including the recent failed proposal at Stanford. The professor argued that these campaigns were “filled with ignorance” and were merely venues for students to propagate misinformation about the situation in the Middle East.

“They serve no purpose at all but simplify the problem,” he said. “Stanford will not divest from Israel. It’s too smart. It knows it’s not in its economic self-interest. It’s also immoral, and Stanford is a moral institution.”

While Dershowitz spoke to a half-full auditorium, and offered criticism of the treatments by Arabs in Israel — “very unsatisfactory, improving considerably, but not nearly improving enough” — his visit nevertheless did draw protest.

His visit prompted a protest by eight students affiliated with Amnesty International, who claimed that Dershowitz supports legal exceptions for torture. The students were dressed in orange jump suits and had trash bags pulled over their heads. For about 30 minutes, they sat in a line on the stairs of Memorial Auditorium with their heads pointed toward the ground while three Amnesty volunteers handed out flyers.

In his speech Dershowitz said that he does not support torture, but he does believe that if torture is going to happen it must happen in a transparent and verifiable matter.

“In principle, killing one terrorist to save lots of lives is a tradeoff worth making,” he said. “Don’t confuse my descriptive statement that torture is occurring with a normative statement that torture should occur.”

The Maryland Food Collective, which serves students at the University of Maryland, came under fire recently when one of their workers refused to serve a student because she was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words, “I Stand With Israel.” The incident prompted a letter to the campus newspaper, which in turn led to a public apology from the co-op.

In a statement, the co-op apologized to the student who was denied service, but said [Rachel] Bergstein’s letter [to the newspaper] was a step backward in resolving the issue, writing, “People who were not directly involved with the interaction that occurred on April 24 have greatly misrepresented both parties and have thus slowed down the process of reconciliation.”

Although the female student who was involved in the incident at the collective could not be reached for comment, Avi Mayer, president of the Pro-Israel Terrapin Alliance, said he had spoken to her and could give a rough timeline of events.

On April 24, the student and a friend visited the collective, and when she tried to pay for her items, the worker at the register said the student’s “I Stand With Israel” shirt was offensive and told her to find someone else to help her. The student found another worker and made her purchase, but left the store “emotionally distraught,” Mayer said.

“To my understanding, it was done openly and in front of others, and in a mildly humiliating manner, and that really is something that is not acceptable,” Mayer added. “[The student] really does want to resolve this, but I think it goes way beyond her individual experience because we can’t allow this to occur. We can’t allow this to be an epidemic that goes on.”

The co-op has not clearly outlined what its policy is on individual workers denying service to customers based on political beliefs, and Mayer expressed concern that similar incidents could happen again.

Although Jewish students and leaders of the campus community have been vocal on this issue, the co-op workers have been more hesitant to speak because the collective requires a consensus on any statement made for the whole.

While Bergstein and Mayer said that any dialogue was a sign that the controversy is moving in the right direction, they lamented that those on both sides of the argument haven’t worked harder to reconcile their differences.

“I wanted people to ask positive questions [because of the letter], but instead I heard people are going into the co-op and saying, ‘So I heard you hate Jews,’” Bergstein said.