Editing The Holocaust Industry (section)

=== ''The Holocaust Industry'' Highlights Bad History and Fraudulent Mémoires ===
Many popular Holocaust books by contemporary writers have, in Finkelstein's view, little scholarly merit. He faults [[Deborah Lipstadt|Deborah Lipstadt's]] 1993 book ''[[Denying the Holocaust]]'' for expanding the definition of [[Holocaust denial]] to include questioning its uniqueness. He writes that [[Daniel Goldhagen]], in his 1996 book ''[[Hitler's Willing Executioners|Hitler’s Willing Executioners]]'', inaccurately characterizes the entire German people as eager Jew murderers driven by pathological hatred.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Finkelstein |first=Norman |date=1997-08-01 |title=Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 'Crazy' Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners |url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i224/articles/norman-finkelstein-daniel-jonah-goldhagen-s-crazy-thesis-a-critique-of-hitler-s-willing-executioners.pdf |journal=New Left Review |issue=I/224 |pages=39–87}}</ref><ref name="Finkelstein2003" />{{Rp|pages=63–69}}

The [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum|U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum]] in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1993, gets sharp criticism from Finkelstein.  Why, he asks, did the victims of the Holocaust get a national museum but not the victims of [[Slavery in the United States|American slavery]] or the [[Native American genocide in the United States|American Indian extermination]]? He also argues that the Gentile victims of the Holocaust – especially the Romani victims of the [[Romani Holocaust|Porajmos]] – got only token recognition in the museum. More generally he claims that museum's leadership is committed to political support of the Israeli state, pointing to its praise of pro-Zionist literature and its condemnation of anti-Zionist literature.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Sridhar |first=C. R. |date=2006 |title=Historical Amnesia: The Romani Holocaust |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4418585 |journal=Economic and Political Weekly |volume=41 |issue=33 |pages=3569–3571 |issn=0012-9976}}</ref><ref name="Finkelstein2003" />{{Rp|pages=72–78}}

Finkelstein takes book reviewers and historians to task for praising two Holocaust memoirs which he reveals to be fraudulent on page 55 of the book: ''[[The Painted Bird]]'' by [[Jerzy Kosiński]] (1965) and ''[[Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood|Fragments]]'' by Binjamin Wilkomirski (1995).<ref name="Finkelstein2003" />{{Rp|pages=55–62}}