By 2016, Finkelstein and Birnbaum are famous for their years of work for Orban, whose 2010 election as Hungarian prime minister—his second stint in the role—was considered an “electoral masterpiece … with implications around the world.”116 One implication of Finkelstein and Birnbaum’s actions is Orban’s construction of an anti-Semitic alternate reality inside Hungary’s cloistered political sphere, one in which George Soros—a wealthy Hungarian-born Jew with few ongoing ties to Hungary—is positioned as the nation’s foremost bogeyman.
