SPME Faculty Profile: Alan Dershowitz

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Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is a Brooklyn native who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer,” one of the “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” and “Israel’s single most visible defender – the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” A graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor at age 25 and was made full professor at age 28, at that time the youngest full professor of law in the school’s history. He was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 1993.

He loves history, especially the history of the founding of the USA and of Israel. He has a huge collection of memorabilia from both, including signed letters from Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Herzl. He is married with one child from his current marriage and two children from a prior marriage.

Regarding SPME, Dershowitz feels that it is a wonderful organization, bringing balance and intelligence to an arena of debate that has all too often been the victim of the opposite approach. He sees the intense need for SPME’s work on campuses to bring logic and neutrality to what is too frequently a one-sided debate on campuses and elsewhere. He is delighted to work with SPME, whose ranks include an outstanding array of high quality scholars and Nobel laureates

He has high praise for founder and immediate past President, Professor Ed Beck, “who has been fantastic in bringing logic and intelligence and credibility to the issues surrounding Israel and the Arab-Israel conflict.”

His vision for SPME is to get more academics involved, especially those silent supporters of Israel who are reluctant to speak out due to the possibility of repercussions from colleagues and others. He feels that it is important that SPME’s broad tent be maintained, so that academics from the left, middle, and right of the debate can enjoy both support from SPME and the open SPME forum in which these issues can be discussed without intimidation or ostracism. It is much to SPME’s credit that it is an organization in which “one can be an active and outspoken member whether one supports ZOA or J Street.”

His suggestion about future directions for SPME is to focus on what he calls the “80% agreement”: no matter how far apart we may be from one another on some details, there is an 80% area of agreement on the core issues — namely, that Israel has the right to thrive as democratic state, to defend itself with appropriate measures, and to not be subject to a double standard; and that academic freedom must prevail on campuses against the forces of anti-Israel intimidation which silence debate and which use inflammatory rhetoric and incendiary diatribe to turn what should be impartial academic analysis into the demagoguery of hate-speech.

SPME Faculty Network Participants should stand united and speak out in one voice on behalf of this 80%.

He has published more than 100 articles in magazines and journals such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Nation, Commentary, Saturday Review, The Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. More than 300 of his articles have appeared in syndication in 50 national daily newspapers. Professor Dershowitz is the author of 27 fiction and non-fiction works with a worldwide audience. His most recent titles include Rights From Wrong, The Case For Israel, The Case For Peace, Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence, Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, Finding Jefferson – A Lost Letter, A Remarkable Discovery, The First Amendment In An Age of Terrorism, and The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza.

In addition to his numerous law review articles and books about criminal and constitutional law, he has written, taught and lectured about history, philosophy, psychology, literature, mathematics, theology, music, sports – and even delicatessens.

In 1983, the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith presented him with the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his “compassionate eloquent leadership and persistent advocacy in the struggle for civil and human rights.” In presenting the award, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel said: “If there had been a few people like Alan Dershowitz during the 1930s and 1940s, the history of European Jewry might have been different.” Professor Dershowitz has been awarded the honorary doctor of laws degree by Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Union College, Brooklyn College, Syracuse University and Haifa University. The New York Criminal Bar Association honored him for his “outstanding contribution as a scholar and dedicated defender of human rights.” Most recently he received the Soviet Jewry Freedom Award by the Russian Jewish Community Foundation (2007).

Much of Dershowitz’s legal career has focused on criminal law, and his clients have included high-profile figures such as Patricia Hearst, Harry Reems, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson, Michael Milken, O.J. Simpson and Kirtanananda Swami.

Dershowitz comments regularly on issues related to Judaism, Israel, civil liberties, the War on Terror, and the First Amendment, and appears frequently in the mainstream media as a guest commentator. As an outspoken defender of Israel, of civil debate, and of rational thought, Dershowitz does not mince words or kowtow to political correctness. He has locked horns with many of Israel’s detractors, including Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Walt and Mearsheimer, and Jimmy Carter.

In spring 2002, a BDS petition at Harvard gathered over 600 signatures, including 74 from the Harvard faculty and 56 from MIT faculty. Among the signatures was that of Dr. Paul D. Hanson, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Dershowitz challenged him to a public debate, and when he failed to appear, Dershowitz staged a “solo debate” with a copy of the BDS petition taped to an empty chair. Dershowitz reviewed the four conditions demanded by the petition and argued Israel was already in compliance, saying “It’s a little bit strange that there should be such a huge debate about four issues which have already been resolved.” He said he personally supports a Palestinian state but argued that, compared with other groups seeking statehood, Palestinians hold a lower “moral priority” because they rejected a U.N. proposal for dividing the Middle East after the Second World War that included the creation of a Palestinian state. Dershowitz also said that it does not make sense that Israel should be singled out as a violator of human rights. Israel stands among the top ten most rights-conscious nations in the world, Dershowitz noted, citing examples of human rights violations in countries that the U.S. supports, such as the execution of homosexuals in Egypt and the repression of women in Saudi Arabia. He went on to distinguish between criticizing the Israeli government, a legitimate endeavor, and signing the BDS petition, an irrational act of pure anti-Semitism. He also threatened to sue any professor who votes against the tenure of another based on the candidate’s ties to Israel, thus calling attention to the inappropriate injection of political bias into what should be a merit-based process in academia.

In March 2006, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt co-authored a controversial working paper entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” criticizing what they called “the Israel Lobby” for influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in a direction away from U.S. interests and toward Israel’s interests. In an interview cited in The Harvard Crimson , Dershowitz disputed the article’s assertions, calling it ‘one-sided’ and its authors ‘liars’ and ‘bigots.’ In an appearance on MSNBC, Dershowitz suggested that the working paper was plagiarized from hate sites and challenged the factual basis of the essay, calling into question the motivations of the authors and their scholarship.

In his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former President Jimmy Carter argues that “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land.” In an op-ed, some newspaper articles, media appearances, and blog posts at The Huffington Post , Dershowitz has taken issue with President Carter’s points of view and has challenged him to debate the matters in public at Brandeis University. Carter has publicly declined. Dershowitz commented that Carter’s refusal to debate wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the fact that he claims that he wrote the book precisely so as to start debate over the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process. If that were really true, Carter would be thrilled to have the opportunity to debate.

In April 2009, Dershowitz participated in theDoha Debates at Georgetown University in Washington DC, where he debated against the motion “this house believes that it is time for the USA to get tough on Israel” with fellow speaker Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Speakers for the motion were Avraham Burg, former Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and former Speaker of the Knesset, and Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the CIA Bin Laden Issue Station. He lost the debate, with 63% of the audience voting for the motion.

[Some of the information summarized above was taken from http://www.alandershowitz.com/biography.php ]

SPME Faculty Profile: Alan Dershowitz

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David Meir-Levi


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