Taking the Stand

by Alan Dershowitz

  Moreover, my high school was a yeshiva—a “parochial school”—and I am not a parochial person. I did not respect most of my teachers, and the feeling was obviously mutual. Creativity was frowned upon. Rote memorization was rewarded. And “respect” for “authority” was not only demanded, it was actually graded—I got a U, for unsatisfactory. Had I attended Yeshiva University, as my mother had hoped, my high school reputation might have followed me. Moreover, although Yeshiva University was considerably less parochial than its high school, it was still a religious institution, with limits on completely free inquiry. When I got to Brooklyn College, I found a place where creativity was rewarded, rote memorization frowned upon, and respect was something to be earned, not merely accorded by the title of rabbi. The same kind of creative and challenging answers that got me Cs and Ds in Yeshiva earned me As in college and law school.

  But there was more at work than a change of schools. I changed over that summer as well. I went as an assistant counselor to a new summer camp, Maple Lake, where I excelled and received praise for my creativity as a songwriter for “color war” and for my leadership skills. I had always been a leader, even during my darkest days in high school, but the school rejected my leadership, fearful that other students would follow me in my heretical ways. I always had an abundance of energy, but it was—in the views of my high school teachers—misdirected.

  That summer at Camp Maple Lake, I received confirmation of my talents, and the result was heightened self-confidence.

  I also met a young woman and began my first serious romantic relationship, which culminated four years later in my first marriage. Suddenly, I was “talented,” “attractive,” and “accepted.” It was a great send-off to college.

  I also had a bit of a chip on my shoulder and an “I’ll show them” attitude toward my high school teachers, who told me I’d never amount to anything, and my principal, who persuaded Yeshiva College not to admit me. I was motivated and raring to go.

  In college, although I succeeded beyond my wildest imagination, I also had deep-seated doubts about whether I was really as good as my grades. I had recurrent nightmares about failing exams and being exposed as a “phony.” I also wondered whether Brooklyn College was easier than Yeshiva, because half the day was not devoted to religious studies. But I didn’t let these doubts get in the way of my success. I loved Brooklyn College, and Brooklyn College loved—and still loves—me.10 (Yeshiva now loves me as well, bestowing on me an “Alumni of the Year” award and an honorary doctorate, reflecting some selective amnesia about our past unhappy relationship.)

  Moving from my teens to my twenties, I find that another question about change arises: Why did I change—again dramatically and precipitously—from a strictly observant Jew into a mostly nonobservant secular Jew? Within a brief period of time, I transformed myself from an Orthodox Jew who put on tefillin and davened every day and never ate anything—even a Nabisco cookie—that didn’t have the magical U, into a secular Jew who went to synagogue only a dozen or so times a year and who did not keep kosher (except in my home, so my parents could eat there).

  These changes occurred in my middle to late twenties and did not reflect any theological epiphany, but rather a rational decision to become my own person, rather than a follower of my parents’ lifestyle. It would have been easy for me to remain observant. By the time I was making the decision, my career was well established. I had been hired by Harvard as an observant Jew, and I could have remained observant with no adverse consequences (other than some silly questions from the dean). Indeed, from a career perspective, there would have been a distinct advantage in remaining part of the Orthodox community. I would have been among the most successful Orthodox lawyers and professors in the world. Having given up Orthodoxy, I was just one among the thousands of highly successful Jewish lawyers and professors.

  I often think about what my life, and that of my family, would have been like had I remained a member of “the club” of Modern Orthodox Jews. The “road not taken” often appears less bumpy than the road actually traveled. But I have no regrets.

  Many of my friends who have remained Orthodox do not understand my decision. They, like me, are skeptics and agnostics, but that has not stopped them from remaining observant. As one old friend put it: “The older I get, the less I believe, but the more I observe.” They love the community of Orthodox observers and want to remain part of it. That requires complying with a set of rules, not believing a set of beliefs. Since I am very rule-abiding in my secular and professional life, following the religious rules would have been easy for me, but I chose the road less traveled, at least in comparison to the friends with whom I grew up. And that has made all the difference, both for me and for my children—for better or worse. I simply did not want to impose my parents’ rules on my children. My parents imposed their rules on me and my brother, and I wanted my children to be free to choose a lifestyle for themselves. Of course no one is entirely free from parental influences, and choice is always a matter of degree.

  In my thirties, I made another significant choice. Having spent my first five or six years at Harvard as a pure scholar, writing dozens of law review articles, two casebooks, and hundreds of academic lectures, I was becoming restless. I wanted more action. “I think, therefore I am”11 (even if Descartes got the order right) was not enough. I wanted to do. “I do, therefore I am” is more consistent with my personality and energy level. But I also loved teaching. I didn’t want to stop being a professor.

  I also have always hated to choose among good things. My choice has always been to do everything—not to miss anything. (“FOMS” again! I am terminal!) My wife always reminds me of the wonderful Yiddish expression “With one tuchis [rear end] you cannot dance at two weddings.” Maybe not, but there’s no harm in trying. And why only two, if there are three? (My son Elon, a filmmaker, recently made a clever, short cartoon video showing me breaking the Martha’s Vineyard record by attending five parties in one night!)

  And so, consistent with my lifelong aversion to choosing, I chose not to choose. I decided to remain a professor while also arguing cases and becoming deeply involved in causes.

  Once having dipped my toe in the water of practice, I wouldn’t stop. I loved the challenge of the courtroom and took to it quite naturally. I’ve never looked back. Practice has made me a better teacher, and teaching has made me a better practitioner.

  In my forties, I made another career change. I stopped writing law review articles and started to write books about law for a general audience. My first book, written in my early forties, was The Best Defense,12 which became a national bestseller and is still in print. It has been followed by twenty-eight additional books, six of which became bestsellers. My books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and well over a million of them have been sold throughout the world. One of them, Chutzpah, was the number one bestseller on the New York Times and other lists. My career as a popular writer of nonfiction and fiction has been gratifying, especially when readers tell me that my books have influenced their thinking and their lives. I think of my book writing as part of my job as a teacher, both of my Harvard law students and of my readers.

  In my forties, I also became a regular presence on national television, explaining the law and advocating civil liberties positions. I appeared frequently with Ted Koppel, Larry King, Barbara Walters, and on other widely watched shows. As a result, I became something of a public figure, for better or worse. I also met my second wife, Carolyn Cohen, and began to live a more stable and rewarding home life.

  In my fifties, my life changed again. Because of my success as a lawyer, my media visibility, and my books, I began to attract world famous people as clients. The nature of my practice changed considerably, and although I still took half of my cases without fee, the fees for my paying cases went up dramatically, and for the first time in my life I was relatively wealthy. My wife and I—by this time we had our daughter, Ella—bought a beautiful home in Cambri
dge and a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. We began to collect art and to open our home to students and charity events. Shortly thereafter, my son Jamin married my daughter-in-law Barbara and had two children, Lori and Lyle, making me a relatively young grandfather.

  Clients, including several billionaires, were flocking to me, and I had my choice of cases. I tried to strike a balance among the ones I took, but the media focused only on my rich and famous clients. Suddenly I was a celebrity lawyer. I hated that designation, and it didn’t accurately reflect my day-to-day work, but it stuck, and my obituary will probably use the term, no matter when it is published.

  Shooting Foul Shots at Boston Garden and Throwing the First Pitch at Fenway

  Some of my most gratifying performances occurred on, rather than in, court. I was a varsity basketball player but never started in high school. I even played for two minutes in Madison Square Garden. So when the great sports lawyer Bob Wolfe challenged me to a foul-shooting contest at halftime at a Boston Celtics basketball game in the old Boston Garden, I couldn’t refuse, even though he had been a starting guard on a very good Boston College team. It was for charity, and I had always been a good foul shooter.

  My sons helped prepare me for the shootout. Jamin kept warning me that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as “you don’t shoot an air ball on your first shot, because everyone will laugh at you.” I practiced shooting off the backboard to avoid the humiliation of an air ball.

  We were allowed to practice a couple of hours before the game. We were each assigned a “coach.” Bob got Larry Bird, because he was Bird’s agent. I got Kevin McHale, a really nice guy.

  The Garden was packed for an important, nationally televised Sunday afternoon game, and I was more nervous than I ever get in court.

  Sure enough, my first shot was an air ball. Sure enough, everyone laughed at me.

  Bob’s first shot was a swish. All net. My sons were sure I would be humiliated.

  But I thrive on challenge. So I got down to business, and hit thirteen of the next nineteen shots (we each had twenty shots in two minutes). Bob hit only six. I was cheered and given a check for my favorite charity.

  A few weeks later, we invited Bob and his wife to our Seder. Before we began, he said he wanted to show a short video of our shootout. OK! He had doctored the video to show twenty swishes by him and twenty air balls by me. He said he had made it for his grandchildren!

  Years later, my son Elon arranged for me to throw the first ball at Fenway Park to celebrate my seventieth birthday. Again, I trained. Again, I was nervous. This time there would be no second chance. Only one pitch. My friend David Ginsberg, who owns a small share of the Red Sox, gave me some advice: “You’re not used to throwing from a mound, so it is natural that your pitch will bounce in front of the plate. You have to compensate. Throw high.”

  I followed his advice, and threw a strike to Kevin Youkalis. I have an undoctored photo to prove it.

  My birthday was complete when the Bleacher Bar, located under the centerfield stands, named a New York pastrami sandwich “the Dersh” in my honor. I get a big kick out of quietly ordering “the Dersh” whenever I go there before a game.

  My next career change took place in my sixties, when I began to devote considerable time and energy to the defense of Israel against efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. As I entered my seventh decade and looked back on my life’s work, I saw most trends in the law moving in a positive direction: Freedom of expression, though never secure, was expanding; science was playing more of a role in solving homicides than ever before, though the courts were not keeping pace with technological developments; racial, gender, religious, and even sexual orientation equality, though far from complete, was much closer to reality than when I was growing up. There was, however, one important issue that was moving in the wrong direction: the campaign to demonize Israel, being conducted by the strangest of bedfellows, the hard ideological left and the hard Islamic right. Israel’s imperfections (and what nation is anything but imperfect?) were becoming the newest excuse for legitimizing the oldest of bigotries. The line from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism—a line Martin Luther King warned about shortly before his death—to me was being crossed. For the first time in my adult life, I was seeing an increase in the hatred of Jews, especially Jews who supported Israel.

  Moreover, the fervor against Israel could not be explained in rational policy terms. Israel, the “Jew Among Nations,” was being treated by many on the extreme left and on the Islamic right in the way the Jewish people had been treated for millennia—with irrational hatred often coupled with incitement to violence. This change took me by surprise.

  In the conclusion to my 1991 book, Chutzpah,13 I predicted the end of mainstream, top-down anti-Semitism in America, and its replacement by anti-Zionism. I also predicted “a sharp decline in support for Israel among college and university students,” those who would be tomorrow’s leaders.14 I did not anticipate that the new anti-Zionism would, at least for some, morph into anti-Semitism. I should have, because hatred of Israel was so irrational, so extreme, that it could be explained only by a hatred for Israel’s Jewishness. A confrontation I experienced in 2004 was all too typical.

  It took place in front of Faneuil Hall, the birthplace of American independence and liberty.15 I was receiving a justice award and delivering from the podium of that historic hall a talk on civil liberties in the age of terrorism. When I left, award in hand, I was accosted by a group of screaming, angry young men and women carrying virulently anti-Israel signs. The sign carriers were shouting epithets at me that crossed the line from civility to bigotry. “Dershowitz and Hitler, just the same, the only difference is the name.” The sin that, in the opinion of the screamers, warranted this comparison between me and the man who murdered dozens of my family members was my support for Israel.

  It was irrelevant to these chanters that I also support a Palestinian state, the end of the Israeli occupation, and the dismantling of most of the settlements. The protestors went on to shout, “Dershowitz and Gibbels [sic], just the same, the only difference is the name”—without even knowing how to pronounce the name of the anti-Semitic Nazi butcher.

  One sign carrier shouted that Jews who support Israel were worse than Nazis. Another demanded that I be tortured and killed. It was not only their words; it was the hatred in their eyes. If a dozen Boston police had not been protecting me, I’m afraid I might have been physically attacked. The protestors’ eyes were ablaze with fanatical zeal.

  The feminist writer Phyllis Chesler aptly describes the hatred some young people direct against Israel and supporters of the Jewish state as “eroticized.”16 That is what I saw: passionate hatred, ecstatic and orgasmic. It was beyond mere differences of opinion.

  To be sure, these protestors’ verbal attack on me was constitutionally protected speech, as was the Nazi march through Skokie. But the shouting was plainly calculated to intimidate.

  When I turned to answer one of the bigoted chants, as I always do in these situations, the police officer in charge gently but firmly insisted that I walk directly to my car and not engage the protestors. It was an order, reasonably calculated to assure my safety, and it was right.

  The officer climbed into my car with me and got out only when we were beyond the range of the protest. The intimidation had succeeded. I had been silenced. The false and horrible message had gone unanswered in the plaza near Faneuil Hall.

  I have experienced similar hatred around the world: in California, Toronto, Trondheim, Cape Town, London, and Paris. I needed police protection—sometimes with shields and bulletproof vests—when I spoke about Israel.

  The most bizarre aspect of this old/new hatred I began to experience was that some of it was coming from people who identified themselves as Jews or Israelis (or former Jews or former Israelis). A few even sought to burnish their credentials by identifying themselves as the children or grandchildren of Holocaust victims or survivors. This occurred
on the University of Massachusetts Boston campus, where a group of anti-Israel students, led by a Jewish professor who identified herself as a child of Holocaust survivors, tried to prevent me from speaking by shouting me down. They succeeded in stopping the event before its scheduled ending time.

  I could not remain silent in the face of this dangerous phenomenon. I decided therefore to give priority to my legal and human rights work in defense of Israel and the Jewish community as long as this threat persisted.

  I had wanted to write a book called The Case for Peace, in which I criticized both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict for not doing enough to bring about a compromise peace. Instead, I decided to write The Case for Israel, in 2003,17 in order to provide students with a factual basis for responding to the untruths that are rampant on campuses. (I did subsequently write The Case for Peace.) The Case for Israel became an instant bestseller, both on campuses and around the world, where it was published in many languages and made into a documentary film. I believe it helped change the terms of the debate on many campuses and changed the minds of many people. One example is particularly gratifying. An Arab man named Kassim Hafeez wrote an article in April 2012 entitled “From Anti-Semite to Zionist.”18 In it, he described his journey as follows:

  Growing up in a Muslim community in the UK I was exposed to materials condemning Israel, painting Jews as usurpers and murderers.…