I did not come close to having an 82 average, but fortunately there was also a test that an applicant with nonqualifying grades could take. I did well on the test and was admitted.
I also won a New York State Regents Scholarship, which paid me $1,400 to go to college. (I put the money in an interest-bearing account that paid for my first year at law school.) The state scholarship was based entirely on a single, highly competitive exam. High schools took great pride in how many state scholarships their students won. The relevant statistic that helped rank the schools was the percentage of those who won based on the number of students who took the exam. My high school was obsessed with doing well, so it limited those who could take the exam to students with grade points over 80. I did not qualify, but I knew I could do well on a statewide competitive exam that was graded by outsiders, not by my teachers, who were predisposed against me. So I pleaded with Rabbi Zuroff to take the exam. He refused, telling me I would never win and that my taking it would just bring down the percentage. Not satisfied with his answer, I filed a petition with the New York Regents—my first of many petitions. To everyone’s surprise, the Regents ruled in my favor and the school was ordered to let me, and everyone else, take the exam. Two of us who had averages below 80, along with four or five others, won the scholarship. My principal’s first reaction was that I must have cheated, but a check of the seating chart showed that I was not sitting near anyone else who won. So off I went to Brooklyn College, with money in my bank account. It was a turning point for me academically, professionally, religiously, and existentially.
Several years ago, the New York Times Magazine asked me to reflect back on my teen years for a column entitled About Men.24 I wrote about my nostalgia for the 1950s:
… chintzy replicas of vintage Chevys and Thunderbirds, overpriced miniature jukeboxes that play “Rock Around the Clock,” anything reminiscent of the 1955 world champion Brooklyn Dodgers, reruns of television sitcoms and revivals of shows I hated in their original incarnations.
Then I noted the irony, because my early teen years were miserable, filled with self-doubt and humbling experiences, such as this:
It was prom time, and the girls had established a committee of three to which the boys had to apply for dates. I had my eye on a pretty blonde from an adjoining neighborhood (her distance, I hoped, might have kept her from learning of my questionable reputation among the local parents). As I approached the committee and shyly uttered “Karen,” all three arbiters laughed. “Don’t you know,” the cruelest admonished me, “that Karen is on the A list and you’re on the C list? You can only pick from the C or D lists.” It was a relief to learn there was a list lower than mine, but a shock to be confronted with my official ranking.
The early 1950s—my high school years—were not my finest hours. Yet they were as formative as any other period, though the dynamic was mostly reactive. I think about them often. My wife, who is a psychologist, says I am obsessed with nostalgia for my troubled adolescent past because I would like to relive that time—both to regain my vigorous youth and to use it in a more productive manner. Or maybe it’s because I can now relive those years without the pain and uncertainty I felt back then. I’m not sure. But I am sure that my early teens laid a firm foundation for my successful late teens—my college years at Brooklyn between the ages of sixteen and twenty.
I had something to prove, and I went about proving it with a vengeance.
My parents were hoping I would make a B average in college, which was very respectable in those days before grade inflation. They didn’t want me to get As because A students became schoolteachers, and they didn’t want me to get Cs, as I had in high school. I could never satisfy them. I went straight from Cs to As, almost never getting a B in anything. I blossomed in college, though I didn’t do anything very different from what I had done in high school. I was a “smart aleck” and a “wise guy,” but these qualities were appreciated and rewarded at Brooklyn College, while at Yeshiva High School they were punished. Whenever I came up with anything original in my high school religious classes, my rabbis would say: “If your idea is so good, then the ancient rabbis, who were so much smarter than you, would have come up with it first. If those rabbis, who were so much smarter than you, didn’t come up with the idea first, then it can’t be any good.” End of discussion. College was very different.
2
MY SECULAR EDUCATION
Brooklyn and Yale
A recent biographical vignette described the beginning of my college career in somewhat dramatic terms: “Then—like an earthquake—suddenly, without warning and with great force, Alan Dershowitz happened … when he scrambled to barely gain admission to Brooklyn College. It seems like the man we know as one of the most respected lawyers in the land was born the day he first crossed the threshold of that institution.”1 There is some truth to that. I loved everything about Brooklyn College. The inner-city campus was a green and lush oasis amid the grit of Flatbush. Though it was only an hour walk from Boro Park, it was as far away—intellectually and emotionally—as Cambridge, New Haven, or Palo Alto. The professors were phenomenal teachers—many of them en route to more elite universities. The students, though mostly Jewish, seemed diverse to me because so few were Orthodox. Debate filled the classrooms, the lunchrooms, and the quad. No one said “Meturnished.” Every idea was acceptable (except Communism; the stench of McCarthyism still hung in the air).
I felt free to experiment with my thoughts and words. Yet I remained an Orthodox Jew in practice, and I did not try drugs or alcohol.
My friends and I founded a “house plan”—an urban fraternity for students who lived at home with their parents. We called it Knight House, and our boastful Latin slogan was Semil equis satis—“Once a knight is enough.” Since we were Orthodox, we could not attend the Friday night parties, so our house plan had its parties on Saturday night. We were desperate to defy the stereotype of Orthodox wimps, so we worked hard on our athletic skills, ultimately winning the house plan championship in several sports. (I still have news clippings attesting to our accomplishments: KNIGHT SOCCER CHAMPS—AL DERSHOWITZ LED THE KNIGHTERS TO VICTORY, SCORING TWO LARGE GOALS.
During my first year at Brooklyn College, a group of Knight Housers took a trip to Washington, D.C. The king of Saudi Arabia was a state visitor, and green Saudi flags draped the important monuments. When I saw the flag of that slave-owning dictator on the Lincoln Memorial, I tore it down and was immediately taken into custody by a park policeman. His superior was sympathetic, however, and let me go with a warning: “Next time, make sure no one sees you when you tear down the rest of those damn flags.”
In my senior year, a group of us decided it was time to lose our virginity. We heard that there was a special deal over Christmas to travel to Havana. We drove to Florida and bought round-trip tickets to Havana for $59. We had the name of a house that specialized in transitioning young boys into men. We were scheduled to make the flight the day before the 1959 New Year, but a bearded guy named Fidel got there first and we couldn’t make it.2
Mostly, I worked hard, achieving an A average and Phi Beta Kappa, winning debate tournaments and being elected president of the student council and captain of the debate team. Reading became a passion: literature (Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Bellow); philosophy (Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche); history (Churchill, C. Vann Woodward, Schlesinger). I loved arguing with professors. One of my favorites was John Hope Franklin, the first African-American appointed to the chairmanship of a department in a college that was not historically black. We remained friends and colleagues until his death.
Another favorite was a philosopher named John Hospers, who excelled at the Socratic method. He was a libertarian whose favorite author was Ayn Rand. After leaving Brooklyn College for a West Coast professorship, Hospers helped to found the Libertarian Party and became its candidate for President of the United States.
My presidency of the student council brought me into conflict with Harry Gideonse, th
e president of the college, a midwestern conservative who was brought to Brooklyn to “clean out” what had become “the little red schoolhouse.” Several professors had been fired because of their “red” affiliations, and I fought against this post-McCarthy purge. Leading the other side was a professor of Romance languages named Eugene Scalia, an elegant and brilliant reactionary whose son Antonin has followed in his ideological footsteps.
Despite my conflict with President Gideonse, the school nominated me for a Rhodes Scholarship.3 But in those days Jewish boys (only males were eligible) from Brooklyn were not selected, and despite my academic, political, and athletic accomplishments, I did not even get an interview. It took more than thirty years for a Brooklyn College student to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.4
Since I had done very well in college, I got into all the law schools to which I applied. I chose Yale, much to my mother’s regret.5 When people asked her where I went to law school, she replied, “He got into Harvard, but he went to Yale.”
Immediately after graduating from Brooklyn, I married my girlfriend, whom I had met at the Jewish summer camp that boasted of the many shidachs (“meetings that resulted in marriages”) for which it was responsible. I was not yet twenty-one. (My parents had to sign my marriage application.) Sue was nineteen. My mother wouldn’t let me go to an out-of-town law school unless I was married, for fear that I would meet “the wrong kind of girl.” Even though I was married, my parents picked my apartment, which they made sure was across the street from the Orthodox shul so the rabbi “could keep an eye” on me. A year after we were married, Sue became pregnant with our first child, Elon.
Because I was married and had a child, I did not participate fully in the social life of Yale. I ate lunch with other married students; our wives prepared sandwiches for us. (One of my classmates was married to Martha Stewart. She made one hell of a sandwich.) Nevertheless, I loved Yale Law School because of its academic excellence. During my first semester, I had Professor Guido Calabresi. It was his first year of teaching, and he looked more like a student than a professor, but he was a fantastic teacher. My first written assignment earned me a D from the teaching fellow and a suggestion that I might not be suited to the study of law. I was devastated. But that night Calabresi called and told me that my paper, though the worst written, was the most brilliant in the class. “You write like you’re having a conversation with your friends in Brooklyn.” He worked with me all semester to improve my writing.
When I told my mother that my most brilliant professor was named Guido Calabresi, she immediately asked, “Is he an Italian Jew?” I replied, “Ma, non-Jews can be smart too.” She looked at me as if to say, “Wait, you’ll see.” When I later learned that he was in fact a descendant of the famous Finzi-Contini family of Italian Jews,6 I refused to give my mother the satisfaction of telling her she was right—at least about Calabresi.
How a Frozen Tongue Saved Me
I was coming from my parents’ house in Brooklyn and heading back to school in New Haven. My mother, as usual, had given me some food to take back. It was a solidly frozen tongue. As I got off the subway and approached the railroad station, a guy grabbed my briefcase and started to kick me. I swung my tongue at his knee, knocked him to the ground, grabbed my briefcase, and escaped. Had the tongue not been frozen solid, who knows what would have happened?
I was reminded of this event while watching an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in which a wife kills her husband by hitting him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. When a policeman comes looking for the weapon, the murderer serves him the lamb, and he eats the evidence. I too ate my weapon.
One of my teachers was Abe Goldstein, who had grown up in Williamsburg, near my family. My class contained lots of students with famous names—William Brennan, Jr. (son of the justice); a grandson of Chief Justice Warren; a descendant of President Taft; a descendant of John Marshall; and others. When Abe Goldstein called on each of these men, he did it without mentioning their heritage. But when he came to me, he said, “Dershowitz, from the well-known Dershowitz family?” The class burst out laughing. For a moment I thought he was mocking me, but he explained that in Williamsburg, the Dershowitz name was highly regarded.
It was not the only time I would be laughed at by my fellow Yale students. The first time I was called on to recite a case, there were chuckles at my thick Brooklyn accent, as there had been at my non-preppy garb, which included Bermuda shorts with a Phi Beta Kappa key ostentatiously dangling from a pocket.
My lack of sophistication cost me my first teaching job. During my first semester at Yale, I applied for a job as a teaching assistant for a political science course at New Haven State Teachers College, where the president made the hiring decisions. The day I went to meet him was rainy, and as soon as he saw my muddy shoes, he told me I wasn’t suitable for the job. It would be the last time I was ever turned down for a teaching job.
All first year law students at Yale were required to participate in a moot court competition. My opponent was named Taft, one of the most prominent names in America. My mother was convinced that I couldn’t possibly compete with a Taft. To provide support, she and my father came to watch me argue. When my mother told my grandmother that I had beaten a Taft, she replied, “Taft? That’s a funny name. I wonder what he changed it from.” In my neighborhood, many short names, like many short noses, had once been longer.
In my second year, I was elected editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. I was the first Orthodox Jew to serve in that capacity, so some doubted that this seven-day-a-week job could be done by a six-day-a-week worker. At the end of the year a few of my associate editors presented me with a mock copy of the law journal in which every seventh page was blank.
Yale Law School was an institution of meritocracy, where one could rise to the top, regardless of name or heritage. I was first in my class. But that wasn’t enough for the Wall Street firms. During my second year, I applied to about thirty such firms for a summer job, and was turned down by every one. The hiring partner of Sullivan & Cromwell looked at my transcript and saw all As, except for one C in Contracts. (I was so angry with my Contracts professor that I immediately enrolled in Advanced Contracts with the same teacher and got an A.) The hiring partner brushed me away and said, “We don’t take C students.” Years later he approached me at a Yale reunion and told me that he had saved me from a bad experience. He disclosed that he was a closet Jew and realized that I would never fit into the culture of that firm. Within several years, however, that firm along with most other Wall Street firms, had significant numbers of Jewish associates and partners.7 (In the late 1970s, I sued one of the firms that hadn’t hired me, for refusing to promote an Italian-American to partnership, and won a ruling that discrimination in promotion was prohibited by the law.)8
After being turned down for a summer job by the Wall Street firms, I went to see the dean of Yale Law School, Eugene Rostow. Rostow was Jewish but had managed to get a job at a Wall Street firm, and so he was called “Dean Gene, the white-shoe Jew.” He explained that it was not impossible for an Eastern European Jew to break into Wall Street and that an important consideration was “appearance.” He told me to “think Yiddish, but dress British,” and he gave me $100 from the dean’s fund to buy an appropriate “interview suit” at J. Press, the local preppy store. I bought a blue blazer with brass buttons, a striped tie, and a pair of loafers. As my grandmother would have put it: S’gurnished helfen—“It didn’t help.” No Wall Street firm wanted me, blazer or not.
I got two offers, both with Jewish firms, but even one of them discriminated against me on account of my religion. Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton, and Garrison offered me a summer job at $100 a week. (I still have the letter!) I accepted and wrote to them that I could not work on Saturday. I was told to come and meet some of the partners when I was next in New York. I was introduced to the firm’s major “rainmaker,” Simon Rifkin, a prominent Jew who was active in numerous Jewish organizations. He told
me how pleased he was that I would be working with the firm, but asked me why I would not be available on Saturdays. When I told him it was because I was Sabbath observant, he replied, “Oh no, we can’t have that here. I thought it was just a restriction on your availability this summer. I need associates who are available seven days a week.” So I took a job with the other Jewish firm, Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays, and Handler. They were perfectly comfortable with my being Sabbath observant. The big rainmaker at that firm was Milton Handler, who was so busy seeing clients that he would ask associates to drive home with him or to go with him to Columbia when he was going to teach. One day his secretary called and said Mr. Handler wanted me to meet him at a particular address. When I got there, his private barber was cutting his hair. I was seated next to him, and he dictated to me while he got his haircut. It wasn’t as bad as what Lyndon Johnson would do, requiring aides to join him in the bathroom.
While working at Kay, Scholer, I was asked to join two partners for lunch at an elegant private club. Though I was twenty-two years old, I had never before eaten out other than at delis. When the waiter put a napkin in my lap, I didn’t know what to do with it. So I tucked it under my neck to protect my new tie. One of the partners pulled it off and said, “Young man, this is not a barbershop.”
During my years at law school, I developed an interest in writing academic articles. At Brooklyn College, I had written a paper about the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. In it, I explored the history, policies, and applications of the privilege, especially in the context of legislative investigations, where many of the battles over the scope of the Fifth Amendment were then being fought, as witnesses were forced to name names or be branded “Fifth Amendment Communists.” I pointed out that the privilege had been “adapted to changing times and needs,” and concluded that though we “are considering the very same constitutional phrase, we are dealing with a completely new and hitherto unknown privilege.”9 (I would repeat the theme of a changing Constitution in many of my writings over the years and would eventually write a book about the Fifth Amendment.)10
Taking the Stand Page 7
