to deny him access to the Yad Vashem's archives, was his assessment that elements of Jewish society, such as the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), were complicit in the genocide. and that this was partly rooted in long-standing attitudes of European Jews, rather than attempts at survival or exploitation. In his own words: I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws and contracts ... Ultimately I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance. This part of his work was criticized harshly by many Jews as impious, and a defamation of the dead. His master's thesis sponsor persuaded him to remove this idea from his thesis, though he was determined to restore it. Even his father, on reading his manuscript, was disconcerted. The result of his approach, and the sharp criticism it aroused in certain quarters, was such, as he records in the same book, that: It has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought, that in my research and writing I was pursuing not merely another direction but one which was the exact opposite of a signal that pulsated endlessly through the Jewish community ... The philistines in my field are everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and clichés. Public role Hilberg was the only scholar interviewed for Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, and according to Guy Austin he was "a key influence on Lanzmann" in depicting the logistics of the genocide. He was a strong supporter of the research of Norman Finkelstein during the latter's unsuccessful attempt to secure tenure; of Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry, which Hilberg endorsed "with specific regard" to his demonstration that the money claimed to be owed by Swiss banks to Holocaust survivors was greatly exaggerated; and of his critique of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Hilberg also made a posthumous appearance in the 2009 film, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein. In regard to claims that a New anti-Semitism was emerging, Hilberg, speaking in 2007, was dismissive. Comparing incidents in recent times with the socially entrenched structural anti-Semitism of the past was like 'picking up a few pebbles