Norman Finkelstein was born on December 8, Brooklyn, New York City in 1953 to Holocaust survivors Mary and Zacharias Finkelstein. Finkelstein's parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. His father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, and then emigrated to the United States, where his father became a factory worker and his mother a homemaker and later a bookkeeper. Finkelstein's mother was an ardent pacifist.
Finkelstein has said of his parents that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on".
Finkelstein grew up in Borough Park, then Mill Basin, both in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. In his memoir he recalls strongly identifying with the outrage that his mother, who witnessed the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage the United States wrought in the Vietnam War.
He attended James Madison High School followed by Binghamton College, where he graduated in 1974 with a degree in History. Finkelstein enrolled at Princeton University where he earned a Master's degree in political science and a PhD in political studies in 1988. He also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.
As a young man, Finkelstein identified as a Maoist and worked for The Guardian, a Maoist newsweekly. After the 1981 trial of the Gang of Four, Finkelstein had a falling out with Maoist politics.
Following this experience, Finkelstein decided to develop his worldview with meticulous scholarship. Finkelstein recounts spending an entire summer in the New York Public Library comparing historical population records of Palestine to the claims made in the Joan Peters Zionist text "From Time Immemorial".
Finkelstein's work largely debunked the text, which was well-regarded at the time, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 1985. Finkelstein's skepticism of scholarship regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict would continue to characterize his academic career.
In 2003, Alan Dershowitz published "The Case for Israel", which Finkelstein called "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense". Dershowitz began campaigning to block Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul University. In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University. In response, Finkelstein resigned, and students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in protest.
In 2008, Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel. In 2009, a documentary film about Finkelstein's life and career was published, titled "American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein".
"My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies."
- Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein - Israel and Palestine
An Unpopular Man - Norman Finkelstein, TNR 
FINKELSTEIN: Misadventures in the Class Struggle - 
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"Soviet nostalgia" is a strange term. People under the soviets had a clear vision of what they were working for, being nostalgic for a time when everyone was working for something instead of this neoliberal shit where nobody really feels like any of us have any direction. I keep coming back to the idea that this lack of societal aspiration is the reason that the russian orthdox church has grown, people trying to find a meaning to live because that meaning and collective goal stopped being part of society when the soviets were overthrown.
Anyway it's just odd to me, it's nostalgia for something that was all about the future we can build towards. Nostalgia for the future. It's contradictory and weird.
Something along the lines of hauntology?
Yes it's a term that's almost always used by the west to slander the attitude but I can't actually help but see the term as a positive thing. Nostalgia is good right? I don't understand why they attempt to use it in the negative. Maybe because they're afraid of provoking a reaction from these "nostalgic" people they're afraid to describe it too harshly.
It's definitely a ghost that haunts them.
It's ironic that you bring up hauntology because I think I wrote this comment while listening to this which I would definitely say is hauntological music to an extent: https://youtu.be/DMoCM_FgLP8
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think it's almost pure propaganda to discredit people who say that life was better under Communism. You can't just have people going around telling the youth that they used to not have to worry about food or rent or medicine or stable employment. The libs have worked very hard for decades to indoctrinate the youth with the idea that communism was an unmitigated, horrifying disaster. Old people going around saying "Yeah actually almost everything was better back then" is a huge threat, so they have to create the idea that it's olds mis-remembering the past.