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TOTAL PAGES 401

                    TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: Ideology as Biography—A life of continuous change
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Pages 9

Part I:  From Brooklyn to Cambridge (with stops in New Haven and Washington)

Chapter 1: Born and religiously educated in Brooklyn
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Pages 27

Chapter 2:  My Secular Education—Brooklyn and Yale
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Pages 6

Chapter 3:  My Clerkships:  Judge Bazelon and Justice Goldberg
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Pages 24

Chapter 4: Beginning my life as an academic—and its changes over time
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Pages 12

Part II:  The changing sound and look of freedom of speech: from the Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks and from Harry Reems’ Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat.”  

Chapter 5:  The Changing First Amendment—New Meanings For Old Words
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Pages 9

Chapter 6  Offensiveness- Pornography:  I Am Curious Yellow and Deep Throat
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Pages 24

Chapter 7  Disclosure of Secrets:  From Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks
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Pages 13

Chapter 8:  Expressions that incite violence and disrupt speakers
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Chapter 9:  The Right to Falsify History:  Holocaust Denial and Academic Freedom
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Pages 10

Chapter 10:  Speech that Conflicts with Reputational and Privacy Rights  
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Part III: Criminal Justice: From Sherlock Holmes to Barry Scheck and CSI

Chapter 11:  “Death is different” 1 : Challenging Capital Punishment
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Chapter 12:  The death penalty for those who don’t kill:  Ricky and Raymond Tison 
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Pages 20

Chapter 13:  Using Science, Law, Logic and Experience to Disprove Murder
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Pages 51

Chapter 14:  The changing politics of rape:  From “no” means “maybe,” to “maybe” means “no.”
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Pages 29

Chapter 15: The changing impact of the media on the law
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Pages 29

PART IV:  THE NEVERENDING QUEST FOR EQUALITY AND JUSTICE

Chapter 16:  The Changing Face of Race:  From Color Blindness to Race-Specific Remedies
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Pages 26

Chapter 17 The crumbling wall between church and state:  from separation to christianization
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Pages 16

Chapter 18:  From Human Right to Human Wrongs:  How the hard left hijacked the Human Rights Agenda
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Pages 27

Conclusion—Closing Argument:

Looking back at my 50 year career and forward to the laws next 50 years.
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Pages 13

APPENDIX—VIGNETTES
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Pages 42 (each on separate page)





                    Alan Dershowitz Takes The Stand: An Autobiography

                    Or

                    Taking the Stand—an Autobiography by Alan Dershowitz

                    Preface: Ideology as Biography—A life of continuous change


My legal practice has been described as “the most fascinating on the planet.” 2   Though perhaps hyperbolic, the fact is that during my long career as a lawyer, I have:

       •  represented and counseled presidents, prime ministers, United Nations high officials, judges, senators, actors, musicians, athletes as well as ordinary people who have had the most extraordinary cases;

       •  played a role, sometimes large, sometimes small, in some of the most cataclysmic events of the last half century—from the assassination of JFK, to the forced resignation of Richard Nixon, to the Chappaquiddick investigation of Ted Kennedy, to the impeachment of President Clinton, to the war crimes trials of accused war criminals, to the defense of Israel in international fora.  

       •  represented some of the most despised and despicable people on the face of the earth and
     sat across the table from defendants accused of mass murder, terrorism, war crimes, torture, rape and hate crimes;

       •   served as a lawyer in some of the most transforming legal cases of the age, including the Pentagon Papers Case, the WikiLeaks investigation, the anti-war prosecutions of Dr. Spock, the Chicago 7, the Weather Underground and Patricia Hearst;  

       •  represented some of the most controversial defendants in recent history:  OJ Simpson; Claus Von Bulow; Mike Tyson; Leona Helmsley and Michael Milken.  


This autobiography delves beneath the surface of these cases and causes.  It presents an inside account of legal events that have altered history and that continue to have a major impact on the lives of millions of people.  

What Tocqueville observed two centuries ago—that in our country nearly every great issue finds its way into the courts—is even truer today than it was then.  Accordingly, my autobiography will, in some sense, be a history of the last half century as seen through the eyes of a lawyer who was privileged to have participated in many of the most intriguing and important cases and controversies of our era.  
The law has changed considerably over the past half century.  I have not only observed and written about these changes, I have helped to bring some of them about through my litigation, my writing and my teaching.  This book presents an account of these changes and of my participation in the cases that precipitated them.  It is also an account of one man’s intellectual and ideological development during a dramatic century of world, American, and Jewish history, enriched with anecdotes and behind-the-scenes stories from my life and the lives of those I have encountered.  

An autobiographer is like a defendant who takes the stand at his own trial.  We all have the right to remain silent, both in life and in law.  But if one elects to bear witness about his own life, then he or she must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  This commitment to complete candor is subject only to limited privileges such as those between a lawyer and a client, or a husband and a wife.  A witness may be questioned not only about his actions, but also about his motivations, his feelings, his biases, and his regrets.  In this autobiography, I intend to comply with these rules to the best of my ability.

Why then have I waived my privilege of silence and decided to write this autobiography:  because I have lived the passion of my times and participated in some of the most transforming, legal and political events of the past half century.  In this autobiography, I will describe and explain my role in litigating cases and advocating causes that have changed the political and legal landscape—for better or worse.  I will also explain how I litigate difficult cases—the tactics and strategies I have successfully developed over the years.  My oath of honesty makes it impossible to hide behind the false modesty that often denies the readers of autobiographies an accurate picture of the impact an author has had on events.

Since you’re reading these words, you’ve probably encountered the public Alan Dershowitz—confrontational, unapologetic, brash, tough, argumentative, and uncompromising.  Those who know me well—family, friends, and colleagues—hardly recognize the “character” I play on TV [alternative:  my TV persona].  They tell me in my personal life, I shy away from confrontation and am something of a pushover.  My son Elon says that when people bring me up in conversation, he can instantly tell whether they know me from TV or from personal interactions—whether they know what he calls “The Dersh Character” or “the real Alan.”  

This sharp dichotomy between my public and private personas was brought home to me quite dramatically, when a major motion picture, Reversal of Fortune, was made about my role in the Claus Von Bulow case, and a character, based on me, was played by Tony Award actor Ron Silver.  The New York Times asked me to write an article for the arts and entertainment section on how it feels to watch someone play you on the big screen.

The opening scene of the film had my character playing an energetic basketball game with himself—true enough.  But when he’s interrupted by a phone call giving him the news that he had lost a case involving two brothers on death row (the Tison brothers, see Chapter 12), he smashes the phone on the pavement.  

When I complained to my son, who had co-produced the film, that I don’t throw phones when I lose cases—even capital cases—my son responded:  “Dad, you’ve got to get it through your head that the person on the screen isn’t you; it’s your character—‘the Dersh Character.’”  He continued to assure me, in his best professional manner, that characters have to “establish themselves” early in the film, and that this “establishing scene” was intended to convey my energy and my passion for the rights of criminal defendants.  “If we had several hours, we could have demonstrated your passion by recounting your involvement in many other cases, but we had about a minute; hence the smashed phone.”  

I wasn’t satisfied.  “That scene doesn’t show passion,” I said.  “It shows a temper tantrum.”  My son tried to explain that a character in a film has to be shown with some faults early on in the film, so that he can “overcome” them.  “I know you don’t lose your temper,” Elon assured me smilingly, “but the viewing audience has to see you grow.”

Still, I didn’t like being portrayed as a person whose passions—manifested by occasional curses in addition to the smashed phone—are reserved exclusively for his professional life.  My “girlfriend” in the film—a mostly fictional character played by Annabella Sciorra—complains loudly that my character has nothing left for the people around him, and my character seems to agree: “My clients are the people I care about.”  Poor guy!  I hope that’s not me, although I do have to acknowledge that people who know me only professionally assume that I have nothing left for those I love.  But the fact is that I reserve a lot of love, loyalty and friendship for family and people close to me.  

I asked Ron Silver—who knows how important my family and friends are to me—how he felt playing me in way that he knew was something of a stereotype of the passionate lawyer for whom, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ said, “the law is a jealous mistress.”  He responded:  “I’m playing the public Alan Dershowitz—the one people see on TV and in the newspapers.  I can’t get to know the private Alan well enough to play him, and frankly the public isn’t interested in that side of you.”  

In this book, I will try to interest my readers in both sides of my life, and how each impacts the other, and how both are very much the products of my early upbringing and my lifelong experiences.  I think of myself as an integrated whole, though the very different roles I play—as lawyer, teacher, writer, father, husband, friend, colleague—require somewhat different balances among the various elements of my persona.  

Although this autobiography is my first attempt to explore my life in full, I have written several earlier books that touch on aspects of my public life.  The Best Defense dealt with my earliest cases during the first decade of my professional life.  Chutzpah covered my Jewish causes and cases.  Reversal of Fortune and Reasonable Doubts each dealt with one specific case (Von Bulow and O.J. Simpson).  I will try not to repeat what I wrote in those books, though some overlap is inevitable.  This more ambitious effort seeks to place my entire professional life into the broader context of how the law has changed over the past half century and how my private life prepared me to play a role in these changes.

I bring to this task a strong and dynamic world view that has been shaped by my life experiences and which has, in turn, shaped my life experiences.  In looking back on my life, I am inevitably peering through the prism of the powerful ideology that has provided a compass for my actions.   

Ideology is biography.  Where we stand is the result of where we sat, who we sat next to, what we observed, what happened to us, and how we reacted to our experiences.  

Ideology is complex.  Its causes are multifaceted and rarely subject to quantification.  The philosopher, Descartes, who famously said, “I think therefore I am” got it backwards.  I am—I was, I will be—therefore I think what I think.  The ability to think is inborn—a biological and genetic endowment.  The content of one’s thinking—the nature and quality of our ideas—is more nurture than nature.  Without human experiences there could be no well-formed ideology, merely simple inborn reflexes based on instinct and genetics. 3   There is no gene, or combination of genes, that ordains the content of our views regarding politics, law, morality or religion. 4   Biology gives us the mechanisms with which to organize our experiences into coherent theories of life, but without these experiences—which begin in the womb and may actually alter the physical structures of our brain over time—all we would have are the mechanics of thought and the potential for formulating complex ideas and ideologies.  It is our interactions—with other human beings, with nature, with nurture, with luck, with love, with hate, with pleasure, with pain, with our own limitations, with our mortality 5 —that shape our world views.  

Among the most enduring and influential human encounters are those experienced at an early age.  These include the accidents of birth:  to which family, in which place, at which time we happen to come into the world.  It is true that most people die with the religion and political affiliation into which they were born (or adopted).  Identical twins, separated at birth, may share a common disposition, IQ and susceptibility to disease, but they are likely to share the religious and political affiliations of their adoptive parents.  There is little genetic about the factors that directly influence religious, political or other ideological choices.  They are largely a function of exposure to external factors. 6 

Many of these external factors are totally beyond the control of the person.  They may involve decisions made by others, often before they were even born.  Probably the most significant decisions affecting my own life were made by my great grandparents on my father’s side and my grandparents on my mother’s side:  the decision to leave the shtetls of Poland and move to New York.  Had they remained in Poland, as some of my relatives did, I would probably not have survived the Holocaust, since I was three years old when the systematic genocide began. 7   That may be why Jews of my generation are so influenced in their attitudes and ideology by the Holocaust.  There but for the grace of God, and the forethought of our grandparents, go we.  (In 1999, I wrote a novel Just Revenge, which reflected my dear feelings about the unavenged murders of so many of my relatives.)  

Once a person is born in a certain place, at a certain time, attitudes and ideology are shaped (in part, because luck always intrudes 8 ) directly by family, religion, culture, neighborhood, childhood friends, teachers and other mentors and role models.  Sometimes they are a reaction to these influences.  Often they are a combination of both.

If ideology is biography, then autobiography must honestly attempt to explore the sources of the author subject’s ideology in his or her life experiences.  This requires not only deep introspection, but a willingness to expose—to the reader but also to the writer—aspects of one’s life that are generally kept private or submerged.  Everyone has the right, within limits, to maintain a zone of privacy.  I have devoted a considerable portion of my professional life seeking to preserve, indeed expand, that zone.  But a decision to write an autobiography requires a commitment to candor and openness—a “waiver” (to use a legal term) of much of the right to privacy.  

I keep fairly complete records of my cases and controversies.  My archives are in the Brooklyn College Library where, subject to a few limited exceptions, they are available for all to read.  I have published dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of blogs.  My professional life has been an open book and the accessibility of my archives—containing letters, drafts and other unpublished material— opens the book even further.  

But beyond the written record lies a trove of memories, ideas, dreams, conversations, actions, inactions, passions, joys, and feelings not easily subject to characterization or categorization.  Fortunately, I have a very good memory (more about that later) and I am prepared to open much of my memory bank in this autobiography, because I believe that the biography that informs my ideology and life choices cannot be limited to the externalities of my career.  It must dig deeper into the thought processes that motivate actions, inactions and choices.  In the process of self-exploration, I must also be willing to examine feelings and motivations that I have kept submerged, willfully or unconsciously, from my own conscious thought process.  I don’t know that I will be able to retrieve them all, but I will try.  Nor can I be absolutely certain that all of my memories are photographically precise, since my children chide me that my stories get “better” with each retelling.  

I believe that my actions, inactions, and choices have been significantly influenced by my upbringing.  That might not seem obvious to those who know me and are familiar with my family background.  Superficially, I am very different from my parents and grandparents, who lived insular lives in the Jewish shteles of Galicia, Poland, the Lower East side of Manhattan, and the Williamberg, Crown Heights and Boro Park Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods (also “shtetles”) of Brooklyn.  My parents and grandparents had little formal education.  They rarely traveled beyond their routes to and from work (except for my grandparents’ one-way journeys from Poland to Ellis Island).  They almost never attended concerts, the Broadway Theater or dance recitals.  They owned no art, few books, and no classical records.  They rarely visited museums or galleries.  Their exposure to culture was limited to things Jewish—cantorial recitations, Yiddish theater, lectures by Orthodox rabbis, Jewish museums, Catskill Mountain and Miami Beach entertainment.  

My adult life has been dramatically different.  I travel the globe, meet with world leaders, own a nice art collection, am deeply involved in the world of music, theater and other forms of culture, and lead a largely secular life (though I too enjoy cantorial music “borsht belt” humor, and a good pastrami sandwich).   

Yet I am their son and grandson.  Although my life has taken a very different course—both personally and professionally—I could not begin to explain who I am, how I got to be who I am, and where I am heading, without exploring my family background and heritage.  It is this history that helped to form me, that caused me to react against parts of it, and—most important—that gave me the tools necessary to choose which aspects of my traditions to accept and which to reject. 9   

I had a very powerful upbringing, having been born to a family with strong views on religion, morality, politics and community service.  My neighborhood was tight knit.  Everyone had a place and knew their place.  Status was important, especially for our parents and grandparents, as was “yichus” (the Yiddish term for ancestry).  But I grew up at a time of change, growth, excitement and opportunity.  

Despite the reality of pervasive anti-Jewish discrimination—in college admission, employment, residency and social clubs—my generation believed there were no limits to what we could accomplish.  If Jackie Robinson could play second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, we could do anything.  Maybe that was the reason so many successful people grew up in Brooklyn in the immediate post-war period.  (In 1971, I was selected among 40 young scholars from around the country for a distinguished fellowship.  When we met in Palo Alto, California, we discovered close to half the group had Brooklyn roots!)  We were the breakout generation, standing on the broad shoulders and backbreaking work of our immigrant grandparents and our working class parents.  

I cannot explain, indeed understand, my own world views, without describing those on whose shoulders I stand, that from which I have broken out, and the experiences that have shaped my life.  So I will begin at the beginning, with my earliest memories and the stories I have been told about my upbringing.

But formative experiences do not end at childhood or adolescence.  They continue throughout a lifetime.  Learning never ends, at least for those with open minds and hearts, and, though ideologies may remain relatively fixed over time, they adapt to changing realities and perceptions.  Winston Churchill famously quipped, “Show me a young conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart.  Show me an old liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brain.”  It is surely true that some people become less idealistic with age, with economic security and family responsibilities.  But it is equally true that some young conservatives become more liberal as they seek common ground with their children, while other people remain true to their earlier world views.  It depends on the life one has lived.  

I have been fortunate to live an ever changing life, both personally and professionally, and although my views on particular issues have been modified over time, my basic commitment to liberal values has remained relatively constant, in part because of my strong upbringing and in part because my career has been based on advocating these values.    
An ancient Chinese curse goes this way: “May you live in interesting times.”  One of the worst things a doctor can say after examining you is: “Hmm… that’s interesting.”  I have been blessed with living an interesting, if often controversial, life.  

As an adolescent, I was involved in causes such as justice for the Rosenbergs, abolition of the death penalty, and the end of McCarthyism.  

As a law clerk, during one of the most dramatic periods of our judicial history, I worked on important civil rights and liberties cases, heard the “I have a dream” speech of Martin Luther King, was close to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and partook of events following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  

As a young lawyer, I played a role in the Pentagon Papers case, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon, and the anti-war prosecutions of Dr. Spock, the Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground and Patricia Hearst.  I consulted on the Chappaquiddick investigation of Ted Kennedy, on the attempted deportation of John Lennon and the draft case against Mohammad Ali.  I was an observer at the trial of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk and subsequently consulted with the Israeli government about that case.

Later in my career, I was a lawyer in the Bill Clinton impeachment, the Bush v. Gore election case, the efforts to free Nelson Mandela, Natan Sharansky and other political prisoners.  I participated in the Senate censure of California Senator Alan Cranston, the Frank Snepp CIA censorship case, prosecutions involving the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, the defense of Israel against international war crime prosecution, and the investigation of Wiki-Leaks and Julian Assange.  I worked on the appeals of the Jewish Defense League murder case and the Jonathan Pollard spy prosecution. I consulted on the defense of director John Landis, the OJ Simpson double murder case and the Bakke “affirmative action” litigation.  I challenged the Bruce Franklin tenure denial at Stanford and appealed the Claus Von Bulow attempted murder conviction, the Leona Helmsley tax case, the Mike Tyson rape prosecution, the conviction of Conrad Black, the Tison Brothers murder case, the “I Am Curious Yellow” censorship prosecution, the Deep Throat case, the nude beach case on Cape Cod and the HAIR censorship case.  I participated in the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow litigation, the Michael Milken case, the litigation against the cigarette industry and the wrongful death suit on behalf of Steven J. Gould.  I have won more than 100 cases and have been called—perhaps also with a bit of hyperbole—“the winningest appellate criminal defense lawyer in history.”  Of the more than three dozen murder and attempted murder cases in which I have participated, I lost fewer than a handful.  None of my capital punishment clients has been executed.  

Among the people I have advised are President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayu and President Moshe Katsav of Israel, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Senator Alan Cranston, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra,  Woody Harrelson, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Natalie Portman, Broadway producer David Merrick, New England Patriot Head Coach Bill Belichick, the actress Isabella Rossellini, the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, singers Carly Simon and David Crosby, basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon, baseball star Kevin Youkilis, football quarterback Tom Brady, saxophonist Stan Goetz, artist Peter Max, cellist Yo Yo Ma, comedian Steven Wright, actor Robert Downey, Jr., several billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson and Mark Rich, authors such as Saul Bellow, David Mamet and Elie Wiesel, and judges, senators, congressmen, governors and other public officials.    

In addition I have had some of the most interesting cases involving people who are not well known but the cases raised intriguing and fascinating issues. Among these issues are whether a man can be prosecuted for attempted murder for shooting a dead body that he thought was alive, whether a husband can be prosecuted on charges of slavery for not doing anything about his wife’s alleged abuse of domestic employees, whether a husband can be forced to adopt a child and whether a law firm can discriminate in its partnership decision.  

I have engaged in public debates and controversies with some of the most contentious and influential figures of the age including William F. Buckley, Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Meyer Kahana, Rabbi Adan Steinzaltz, Justice Antonin Scalia, Ken Starr, Elie Wiesel, Vaclav Havel, Golda Meir, Red Auerbach, William Kunstler, Roy Cohn, Norman Mailer, Patrick Buchanan, Norman  Podhoretz, Bill O’Reilley, Skip Gates, Alan Keyes, Dennis Prager, Jeremy Ben Ami, Mike Hukabee, Shawn Mann, William Bulger, James Zogby, Jimmy Carter, Richard Goldstone, Norman Finkelstein and many others.  

I was part of an American team of debaters selected to confront Soviet debaters on a nationally televised debate, during the height of Soviet oppression of Refusenicks, for which William Buckley suggested that the US team be given medals of freedom.  I was a regular “advocate” on the nationally-televised Peabody award winning show “The Advocates” on PBS for several years.  I have been interviewed by nearly every television and radio talk and news show and have written for most major newspapers, magazines and blogs.  This is my 30th book.

In recent years, I have devoted considerable energy to the defense of Israel, while remaining critical of some of its policies.  The Forward has called me, “America’s most public Jewish defender,” and “Israel’s single most visible defender – the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.”  In 2010, The Prime Minister of Israel asked me to become Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations—an offer I respectfully declined because I am an American, not an Israeli citizen.  I have agreed instead to be available to serve as an American lawyer for Israel before international tribunals.

I have also taught thousands of students, many of whom have become world and national leaders.

I have learned from each of these experiences, and they too have helped to shape my evolving world views.  I have seen the law change, in some respects quite dramatically, in the half century I have been practicing it.  If the past is the best predictor of the future, then I also have some ideas about what changes we might anticipate in the law over the next half century.  

Oliver Wendell Holmes urged his young colleagues to “live the passion of your times.”  I have followed that advice and now wish to share this passion with my readers.  



Part I:  From Brooklyn to Cambridge (with stops in New Haven and Washington)

Chapter 1: Born and religiously educated in Brooklyn

The doctor told my pregnant and anxious mother that she would give birth “first in September.”  So when I was born on September 1, 1938, my mother thought the doctor was a genius.  I was the first person in the history of my family to be born in a hospital.  My maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Poland, wanted me to be born at home, because in Poland, there were rumors that Jewish babies were switched with Polish babies.  To prevent this from happening to his grandchild, he stood guard over me at the baby room.  Nevertheless, when I started to misbehave early in my life, he was convinced that the switch had taken place, despite me being—in my paternal grandmother’s words—“the spittin’ image” of my father.  (I was well into my adult life  before I realized that I was much more like my mother in ways other than physical resemblance.)

I was born in the Williamsberg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where both of my parents had lived most of their lives, having moved as youngsters from the lower East Side of Manhattan where they were born to Orthodox Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century.  When my mother was pregnant with my brother Nathan, who is three and a half years younger than me, we moved to the Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn where I grew up and where my parents remained until their deaths.

Boro Park is unique among American Jewish neighborhoods in that it has always been Jewish.  Unlike the neighborhoods of Manhattan—such as the Lower East side and Harlem, which have had changing ethnic populations—Boro Park has always been, and remains, dominantly Jewish.  The first occupants of the small tract houses built near the beginning of the twentieth century of the site of rural farms were Jewish immigrants seeking to escape from the crowded ghettos of Manhattan and later Williamsberg.  The current occupants of the modern multi-dwelling units are Chasidic Jews who have moved from Crown Heights and Williamsberg seeking to recreate the shtetles of Eastern Europe.  

When I lived in Boro Park during the 1940s and 1950s, it was a modern Orthodox community of second generation Jews whose grandparents had emigrated mostly from Poland and Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Following the end of World War II, some displaced persons who had survived the Holocaust moved into the neighborhood.  

My parents reached adulthood in Williamsberg during the peek of the Great Depression.  My mother Claire had been a very good student at Eastern District High School and at the age of 16 enrolled at City College in the fall of 1929—the first in the history of her family to attend college.  She was forced to leave before the end of the first semester by her father’s deteriorating economic situation.  She went to work as a bookkeeper, earning $12 a week.  

My father, who was not a good student, attended a Yeshiva high school in Williamsberg.  It was called Torah V’Daas—translated as Bible and Knowledge.  He began to work during high school and never attended college.

My grandparents knew each other from the neighborhood even before my parents met.  My grandfathers were both amateur “chazanim,” cantors, who sang the Jewish liturgy in small synagogues, called “shteebles.”  They were slightly competitive, but were both involved in the founding of several Jewish institutions in Williamsberg, including a free loan society, a burial society, the Young Israel synagogue and the Torah V’Daas Yeshiva.  Their day jobs were typical for their generation of Jewish immigrants.  Louis Dershowitz, my paternal grandfather, sold corrugated boxes.  Naphtali Ringel, my maternal grandfather, was a jeweler.  My grandmothers, Ida and Blima, took care of their many children.  Each had eight, but two of Blima’s children died of diphtheria during an epidemic.  My mother nearly died during the influenza outbreak of 1917, but according to family lore, she was saved by being “bleeded.”

I was born toward the end of the depression and exactly a year to the day before the outbreak of the Second World War.  I was the first grandchild on both sides of my family.  Many were to follow.  

Among my earliest memories were vignittes from the Second World War, which ended when I was nearly seven.  I can see my father pasting on the Frigidaire door newspaper maps depicting the progress of allied troops toward Berlin.  I can hear radio accounts, in deep Stentorian voices, from WOR (which I thought spelled “war”) announcing military victories and defeats.  I can still sing ditties I learned from friends (the first sung to the tune of the Disney song from Snow White).

     “Whistle while you work
     Hitler is a jerk
     Mussolini is a meanie
     And the Japs are worse”

And another (sung to the melody of “My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty”):

     “My country tis of thee
     Sweet land of Germany 
     My name is Fritz
     My father was a spy
     Caught by the FBI
     Tomorrow he must die
     My name is Fritz.”

The comic books we read during the war always pitted the superheroes against the “Nazis” and “Japs” and I wanted to help in the effort.  I decided that if Billy Batson could turn into Captain Marvel by simply shouting Shazam, so could I.  And so, after making a cape out of a red towel and tying it around my neck, I jumped out of the window yelling Shazam.  Fortunately, I lived on the first floor and only sustained a scraped knee and a bad case of disillusionment.  (For my 70th birthday, my brother found a card that commemorated the superhero phase of my life; it showed an elderly Superman standing on a ledge, ready to fly, but wondering “now where is it I’m supposed to be flying?”)

If I could help our war effort by turning myself into a superhero, at least I could look out for German spies on our beaches.  When I was four years old, German spies landed on Long Island in a submarine.  Although they were quickly captured, there were rumors of other planned landings.  And so over the next few summers, which my family spent in a rented room near Rockaway Beach, a local police officer paid us kids a penny a day to be on the lookout for “Kraud Subs.”  We took our job very seriously.  

I recall my grandmother Ringel (my mother’s mother), who was recovering from a heart attack, taking me to a rehabilitation home in Lakewood, New Jersey, where several wounded or shell-shocked soldiers were also being rehabilitated and listening to their scary combat stories. 

Then I remember, quite vividly, both VE (Victory in Europe) and VJ (Victory over Japan) days.  There was dancing in the streets, block parties and prayerful celebrations.  Our soldiers, including several of my uncles, were coming home.  (My father received a medical deferment because he had an ulcer, which my mother said was caused by my bad behavior.) 

We weren’t told of any Holocaust or Shoah—those words were not even in our vocabulary—just that we had lost many relatives in Europe to the brutal Nazis and Hitler (“Yemach Sh’mo—may his name be erased from memory).  We cheered Hitler’s death, which according to a Jewish joke of the time, we knew would occur on a Jewish holiday—because whatever day he died would be a Jewish holiday!  A few weeks earlier, we cried over Roosevelt’s passing, which I heard of while listening to the radio and broke the news to my grandmother Ringel, who was taking care of me.  She refused to believe it, until she herself heard it on the radio.  Then she cried.  Roosevelt (which she pronounced like “Rosenfeld”) was the hero of our neighborhood (and other Jewish neighborhoods).  A magazine photo of him hung in our home.  

The “greenies” (recent immigrants, “greenhorns”) who moved to Boro Park from the displaced person camps never talked out what had happened “over there.”  The tattooed numbers on their arms remained unexplained, though we knew they were the dark reminders of terrible events.

Among my other early memories was Israel’s struggle for independence and statehood, just a few years after the war.  My family members were religious Zionists (“Misrachi Zionists”).  We had a blue and white Jewish National Fund “pushka” (charity box) in our homes, and every time we made a phone call, we were supposed to deposit a penny.  We sang the “Jewish National Anthem” (Hatikvah) in school assemblies.  I still remember its original words, before Israel became a state:  “Lashuv L’Eretz Avosainv” (“to return to the land of our ancestors”).  

One particular incident remains a powerful and painful memory.  My mother had a friend from the neighborhood named Mrs. Perlestein, whose son Moshe went off to fight in Israel’s War of Independence.  There was a big party to celebrate his leaving.  Several months later, I saw my mother crying hysterically.  Moshe had been killed, along with 34 other Jewish soldiers and civilians, trying to bring supplies to a Jewish outpost near Jerusalem.  My mother kept sobbing, “She was in the movies, when her son was killed.  She was in the movies.”  Israel’s war had come home to Boro Park.  It had been brought into our own home.  Everyone in the neighborhood knew Moshe and his parents.  He had attended my elementary school, played stickball on my block and was a local hero.  It was a shared tragedy and Moshe’s death—combined with my mother’s reaction to it—had a profound and lasting effect on my 9 year old psyche.

My friends and I formed a “club”—really just a group of kids who played ball together.  We named it “The Palmach”—after the Israeli strike force that was helping to win the war.  We memorized the Palmach Anthem “Rishonin, Tamid Anachnu Tamid, Anu, Anu Hapalmach.”  (“We are always the first, we are the Palmach”).  Recently, I spoke to a Jewish group in Los Angeles and among the guests were Vidal Sassoon (the style master) and David Steinberg (the comedian).  Steinberg mentioned to me that when Sassoon was a young man, he had volunteered to fight for the Palmach (If you think that seems unlikely, consider that “Dr. Ruth”  Westheimer served as a sniper in the same war).  I challenged Sassoon to sing the Palmach Anthem and before you knew it, Sassoon and I were loudly belting out the Hebrew words to the amusement of the other surprised guests.  

Israel declared statehood in May of 1948, when I was nine and a half years old.  Following its bold declaration that after 2,000 years of exile, there arose a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, (supported by the United Nations, the United States, the Soviet Union and most western nations), the nascent state was attacked by the armies of the surrounding Arab countries.  That summer I went to a Hebrew speaking Zionist summer camp called “Massad.”  During my summer at Camp Massad (where the counselor of an adjoining bunk was a young Noam Chomsky, then a fervent left-wing Zionist) we heard daily announcements over the loudspeaker regarding the War of Independence.  We sang Israeli songs, danced the hora and played sports using Hebrew words (a “strike” was a “Shkeya,” a “ball” a “kadur”.)  The announcement I remember most vividly was “Hatinok Rut met hayom”—the “babe” Ruth died today.  But I also remember several announcements regarding the death or wounding of Israelis who were related to the people in the camp.  One out of every hundred Israeli men, women and children were killed—some in cold blood, after surrendering—while defending their new state.  Many of those killed had managed to survive the Holocaust.

We also learned of Stalin’s campaign against Jewish writers, politicians and Zionists.  After the end of the war, Stalin became the new Hitler as we read about show trials, pogroms and executions of Jews.  We hated communism almost as much as we hated fascism.

These early memories—relating to the America’s war against Nazism, Israel’s War of Independence, and Stalin’s war against the Jews—contributed significantly to my emerging ideology and world views.  

I grew up in a home with few books, little music, no art, no secular culture and no intellectualism.  My parents were smart but had no time or patience for these "luxuries."  Our home was modest--the ground floor of a two and half family house.  (The finished basement was rented to my cousin and her new husband).  Our apartment had two small bedrooms, the smaller of which I shared with my brother.  We ate in the kitchen.  The living room, which had the mandatory couch covered with a plastic protector, was reserved for special guests (who were rare).  The tiny bathroom was shared by the four of us.  The foyer doubled as a dining area for Friday night and Shabbat meals.  The total area was certainly under ___ square feet.  But we had an outside—and what an outside it was!  In the front there was a small garden and a stoop.  In the rear there was a tiny back porch, a yard and a garage.  Since we had no car, we rented the garage to another cousin who used it to store the toys he sold wholesale.
We were not poor.  We always had food.  But we couldn’t afford any luxuries, such as restaurants.  We passed down clothing from generation to generation and ate a lot of “leftovers”.  (Remember the comedian who said “we always ate leftovers—nobody has ever found the “original” meal.)  My mother has always said we were “comfortable.”  (The same comedian told about the Jewish man who was hit by a car, and was laying on the ground; when the ambulance attendant asked him “are you comfortable,” he replied, “I make a living.”)


The center of our home was the stoop in front of the house.  We sat on it, played stoop ball on it, jumped from it and slid down the smooth slides on each side of it.  It was like a personal playground.  On nice days, everyone was outside, especially before the advent of television.  We even listened to the radio--Brooklyn Dodger baseball games, the Lone Ranger, "Can You Top This?,"  "The Shadow," "Captain Midnight," and "The Arthur Godfrey Show"--while sitting on the stoop, with the radio connected to an inside socket by a long, frayed extension cord.  We ate lunch on the stoop on days off from school, had our milk and cookies on the stoop when we got back from school, traded jokes, and even did our homework on the stoop.  Mostly, we just sat on the stoop and talked among ourselves and to passing neighbors, who knew where to find us.  In those days, nobody called ahead—phone calls were expensive.  They just dropped by.  


 In front of the stoop was what we called "the gutter."  (Today it is referred to as "the street.")  The gutter was part of our playground since cars rarely drove down our street.  We played punch ball in the gutter, stickball in the driveway and basketball in front of the garage--shooting at a rim screwed to an old ping pong table that was secured to the roof of the garage by a couple of two by fours.


We had no room to play indoors, so we had to use the areas around the house as our play area.  Our house became the magnet for my friends because we had a stoop, a hoop and an area in front of our stoop with few trees to hinder the punched ball.  (A ball that hit a tree was called a “hindoo”—probably a corruption of “hinder.”)


The stereotype of the Brooklyn Jewish home during the immediate post WWII era was one filled with great books, classical music, beautiful art prints and intellectual parents forcing knowledge into their upwardly mobile male children aspiring to become doctors, teachers, lawyers and businessmen.  (The daughters were also taught to be upwardly mobile by marrying the doctors, etc.)





My home could not have been more different--at least externally.  The living room book shelves were filled with inexpensive knickknacks (chachkas).  The only books were a faux leather yellow dictionary that my parents got for free by subscribing to "Coronet Magazine."  When I was in college, they briefly subscribed to the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  There was, of course, a "Chumash" (Hebrew bible) and half dozen prayer books (siddurs and machsers).  I do not recall seeing my parents read anything but newspapers (The New York Post), until I went to college.  They were just too busy making a living--both parents worked--and keeping house.
There were no book stores in Boro Park, expect for a small used book shop that smelled old and seemed to specialize in subversive books.  The owner, who smelled like his mildewed books, looked like Trotsky, who he was said to admire.  We were warned to stay away, lest we be put on some "list" of young subversives.  


My parents, especially my mother, were terrified about “lists” and “records.”  This was, after all, the age of “blacklists,” “redchanels,” and other colored compilations that kept anyone on them from getting a job.  “They will put you on a list,” my mother would warn.  Or “it will go on your permanent record.”  When I was 13 or 14, I actually did something that may have gotten me on a list. 


It was during the height of the McCarthy period, shortly after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death.  A Rosenberg relative was accosting people getting off the train, asking them to sign a petition to save the Rosenbergs’ lives.  I read the petition and it made sense to me, so I signed it.  A nosy neighbor observed the transaction and duly reported it to my mother.  She was convinced that my life was over, my career was ruined and that my willingness to sign a communist-inspired petition would become part of my permanent record.  (Was there ever really a permanent record?  It was certainly drummed into me for years that such a paper existed.  I’d love to find mine and see what’s in it.) 10   My mother decided that I had to be taught a lesson.  She told my father the story.  I could see that my father was proud of what I had done, but my mother told him to slap me.  Ever obedient, he did, causing him more pain than me.



In addition to the “subversive” book store, we had a library that was also tiny and somewhat decrepit, but when I was nearing the end of high school, a new, spacious library opened about half a mile away.  We went there every Friday afternoon--for two reasons.  First, that's where the girls were on Friday afternoon.  And second, we could take out up to four books and keep them for a month.  The two reasons merged when Artie Edelman realized that we could impress the girls by taking out serious books.  Up until that time my reading of serious literature had been limited to Classic Comics.  Don't laugh!
Classic Comics were marvelous.  Not only could we read about the adventures of Ivanhoe, we could see what he looked like!  My first erotic desires were aroused by the illustration of the dark-haired "Jewess" Rebecca.  (I can still picture her and have searched for a copy of the Classic Comic at flea markets from coast to coast to relive my unrequited adolescent lust).  


I recently came across the Classic Comic of Crime and Punishment.  Having read three translations of the great work of Dostoyevsky, I was amazed at how faithful the comic was to the tone, atmosphere and even words of the original.  I tried to give it to my granddaughter who was reading the book for class, but she politely turned down the offer, with a slight air of condescension that one gratefully accepts only from a grandchild.


The first real books I actually read were several to which I had been introduced by the Classic Comics:  The Count of Monte Christo, The Red Badge of Courage; Moby Dick; and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  


During my senior year in high school, I became a voracious reader, to the disdain of some family members.  My Uncle Hedgie (a nickname for Harry) would berate me for sitting around the house reading, when I could be working or playing sports.  "Be a man," he would demand.  "Get off your ass."  But I would stay in my tiny room, with my Webcote tape recorder playing classical music I had recorded off WQXR, the New York Times classical music station, or off a record I borrowed from the library and recorded from my friend Artie's turntable.  I also bought a used copy of the Encyclopedia Americana, whose twenty plus volumes filled the hitherto empty shelves in our living room.  My friend Norman Sohn had found an old book store in Manhattan that sold used Encyclopedias, and the Americana cost only $75, as contrasted with the Britannica, which was $200.  





During my early years, all we had was a small plastic radio that lived in the kitchen, unless it was moved near the stoop.  When I was 10 years old, we bought a ten inch TV "console" that included a 78 phonograph player that opened at the top.  But my mother had situated her "good" lamp on the top of the console, so I couldn't get access to the turntable.  I saved up, and with my Bar Mitzvah money, I bought a humongous webcore reel to reel tape recorder, which must have been a foot cubed.  I could barely lift it, and the tape often tangled or split, but it was better than the wire recorder technology that it replaced.
I loved classical music, especially opera and choral music.  As an adolescent I had sung alto in the local synagogue choir and had a fairly good voice.  I was "fairly" good--but not very good-- at lots of things in addition to singing:  athletics, acting, joke telling and getting dates with girls.  I was very good at only one thing: debating.  And I was equally bad at one thing: school.


My passion for music took me to the Metropolitan Opera House, where for 50 cents, a student could get a seat with a table and a lamp if he came with a score of the opera.  We would borrow the score from the library, take a train to Times Square and listen to Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill, Jan Pierce and Roberta Peters sing Carman, La Boheme and La Traviata.  (We were forbidden to listen to Wagner, because he was an anti-Semite, who_____ admired).  


I also became passionate about art.  All kinds of art from Egyptian and Roman Sculpture to Picasso's Guernica and Rodan's Thinker.  There were no art poster or reproductions in our home.  The walls had mirrors (to make the apartment seem bigger) and some family photos.  But there were free museums all around us, and the library had art books--with pictures of naked women!  I loved Goya's nude, especially when contrasted with the clothed version of La Gioconda who I could imagine undressing just for me!


The girls loved to be asked on a museum date, and we loved to ask because it was free and it showed them that we had "culture" (pronounced "culchah").


To this day I have no idea how I fell in love with literature, music and art.  They are my passions, as they have been since I was old enough to appreciate these "luxuries"--inexpensive as they were to us--that my parents couldn't afford.  I was never exposed to classical music or art, even in school where the music teacher taught us "exotic" songs like “finicula, funicula,” American songs by Stephen Foster, and an assortment of religious and Zionist Hebrew songs.  (Zum Gali, Gali, Gali; Tsena, Tsena; Hayveynu Shalom Alechem.)  Our art teachers tried to teach us to draw “useful” objects, like cars, trains and horses.


My friends’ homes were as barren of culture as mine with the exception of Artie Edelman and Bernie Beck, whose parents were better educated and more cultured than mine.  I must have picked up some appreciation of music and art from them.  When I went to sleep away camp, especially as a junior counselor, I also came in contact with music and art through the “rich” Manhattan kids who had attended the expensive camp as paying campers and were now junior counselors.  Several of them, who became my friends, had been exposed to culture through their more sophisticated Jewish parents.  


None of these peripheral contacts with culture fully explains my transition from a home barren of books, records and posters, to my home as an adult that is filled with books, music, paintings, sculpture and historical objects. 11 


Nor does it explain why none of my three children, who were brought up in my home, have any real passion for the classical arts.  They are by no means uncultured.  They love popular music, films, current fiction, theater and gourmet food.  But they don’t have the same passion for classical music or fine art that I have.  By mentioning this difference, I don’t mean to be a snob, but for someone who strongly believes in the power of nurture, exposure and experience, this generational skip poses a dilemma.  Reaction is, of course, one sort of experience, and my passion may well have been a reaction to my parents, as my childrens’ lack of passion for what moves me so deeply may be a reaction to their parents.  So be it.





The family values that shape my upbringing focused on modern Orthodox Judaism, religious Zionism, political liberalism of the sort represented by FDR, Anti-Nazism, Anti-Communism, opposition to all kinds of discrimination, support for freedom of speech, a hatred of McCarthyism, opposition to the death penalty, a commitment to self defense and defense of family and community, a strong sense of patriotism, and a desire to be as truly American as was consistent with not assimilating and losing our traditions and heritage.  

My father, who was a physically strong but rather meek man, wanted me to be “a tough Jew” who always “fought back.”  He urged me to never let “them” get away with “it.”  By them he meant anti-Semites, and by it, he meant pushing Jews around.  He taught me to box and wrestle and insisted that I never “tattle” on my friends, regardless of the consequences to me.  

One of my father’s brother’s was a man named Yitzchak, who we called Itchie.  It had nothing to do with any skin condition.  One day my Uncle Itchie took me to a Brooklyn Dodger baseball game that got rained out half way through.  We ran to the train station only to find no one tending the token booth.  My uncle had one token and so the two of us squeezed through the turnstile on his one token.  As soon as we got home he took a dime, put it in an envelope and sent it to the transit authority, apologizing profusely for temporarily cheating them of their dime.  A year later he did the same thing, but on a much larger scale.  My Uncle Itchie stowed away on a ship headed for Palestine in order to participate in Israel’s struggle for statehood.  He did not have enough money for passage, so he hid in a closet during the nearly month long trip, getting food from a friend who was paying his own way over.  My Uncle then swam from the ship to shore, evading British authorities.  After working for several months he then sent the full fare for the lowest class of service to the shipping company.  Those were the values with which I was brought up. You do what you have to do, but then you pay your debts.  

Religion in my home was not a matter of faith or an accepted theology.  To this day, I have no idea what my parents believed about the nature of God, the literal truth of the Bible, heaven and hell, or other issues so central to most religions.  Ours was a religion of practice and rules—of required acts and omissions.  A cartoon I once saw perfectly represented my parents approach to religion.  It showed a father dragging his reluctant young son in the direction of the synagogue and saying:  

     “Atheist, Shmathiest, I don’t care—as long as you come to shul.”

Our Judaism was entirely rule bound.  Before every activity, there was a required “brucha”—a formulistic blessing appropriate to the activity.  “Baruch ata Adonoy”—“blessed be you our God”—followed by a reference to His creation:  “who brings forth bread from the earth” or “wine from the grapes” or “fruit from the trees” or “produce from the ground.”  Then there was a generic brucha that covered everything not included among the specific blessing:  “Sheh-hakol Nihiye B’Dvaroh.”  My grandmother Ringel, who was the religious enforcer in the family, would ask demandingly, if she saw me drinking a glass of water, “Did you make a “shakel,” referring to the previously mentioned generic blessing.  My grandmother, who spoke no Hebrew, probably had no idea of the literal meaning of the blessing, but she knew—and insisted that I knew—you had to recite it (even just mumble it) before you drank the water.

There were rules for everything.  If you accidentally used a “milichdika” (dairy) fork on a “flayshidika” (meat) item, the offending (or offended) item had to be buried in the earth for exactly seven days.  That restored its kosher quality by “kashering” it.  After eating meat, we had to wait precisely 6 hours before eating dairy—after eating dairy, however, you had to wait only half an hour to eat meat, but a full hour if the “dairy” meal contained fish.  Not a minute less.  When my parents told me the rules of swimming after eating—wait two hours after a heavy meal, one hour after a light meal, half an hour after a piece of fruit and 15 minutes after a Hershey bar—I thought these were religious rules, because they paralleled the rules about how long you had to wait between meat and dairy.  (I later learned that the swimming rules were based neither on religion, nor upon science, but rather on questionable “folk wisdom.”)

From my earlier days, I accepted the highly technical, rule-oriented religious obligations imposed on me by my parents and grandparents.  It was a lot easier for me to obey rules—even if I didn’t understand the reasons, if any, behind them—than to accept a theology that was always somewhat alien to my rational mindset.  (And I suspect, to my parents, if they even bothered to think about it.)  Everyone in the almost entire Jewish neighborhood (at least everyone who was part of the modern Orthodox community) followed the rules.  Few, I suspect, accepted the entire theological framework  that included the literal truth of the bible, the resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell (which were not in the Jewish Bible) and the incorporeal nature of a single God.  What we cared about was the precise ingredients in a candy bar (no lard or gelatin), the number of steps you could take if your yarmulkah fell off (more on this later), whether you could wear your house key as a tiepin to avoid the prohibition against carrying on the Sabbath, whether it was permissible to use an automatic timer—a “shabos clock”—to turn on the TV for a Saturday afternoon World Series game, or whether you could ride on an elevator on Shabos if it automatically stopped on every floor and required no pressing of buttons.  The rabbis answered these questions for us, but they didn’t always agree.  My mother had little patience with most of the local rabbis because her late father, who was not a rabbi, “knew so much more than they did,” and always resolved religious disputes by accepting the approach that was “easiest” and most adaptive to the modern lifestyle.  Even my grandmother knew more than these “phony rabbis,” my mother would insist contemptuously.  My mother always said, “Respect people, not titles.”  Then she was appalled when I showed disrespect for my frequently incompetent teachers!

Most of the rules we were required to obey were negative ones:  “Donts.”  Don’t—eat unkosher, drive or work on Shabas, eat anything on fast days, marry a non-Jew, eat ice cream after a hot dog, wear leather on Yom Kippur, talk after washing your hands but before making a “motzie” and eating the challah.

My grandmother—the enforcer—had a favorite Yiddish word:  “meturnished”—it is forbidden to do!  She would shout it out in anticipation of any potential violation.  If she saw you about to eat a Nabisco cookie, she would intone the M word.  If she saw you putting a handkerchief in your pocket on Shabas, the word would ring in your ear.  If you even thought about putting your yalmulkah in your pocket, you would hear the word.  Once I began to whistle a tune.  My musical effort was grated with a loud “meturnished.”  “Why?” I implored.  There’s nothing in the Torah about whistling.  “It is unJewish,” my grandmother insisted, “The Goyim whistle, we don’t.”  It’s now more than 30 years, since Grandma Ringel died, but the M word still rings in my ears every time I indulge in a prohibited food or contemplate an un-Jewish activity (such as enjoying a Wagnerian opera).  Freud called it the “superego.”  He must have had a Jewish grandmother too.

Of course we tried to figure out ways around these prohibitions—half of Jewish law seems to be creating technical prohibitions, while the other half seems to be creating ways around them.  Much like the Internal Revenue Code.  No wonder so many Jews become lawyers and accountants.  It’s not in our DNA; it’s in our religious training.  

A story from my earliest childhood illustrates the extraordinary hold that religion—really observance of religious obligations—held over all of us.  

A few months before my brother was born, my father was holding my hand on a busy street, while my mother was shopping.  She had just bought me a new pair of high leather shoes—they went above my ankles.  For some reason, I bolted away from my father and ran into the “gutter.”  My foot was run over by an 18 wheeler truck.  It would have been much worse had my father not pulled me out from under the humongous vehicle.  Fortunately, the new shoes saved my foot from being crushed, but several bones were broken and I was rushed to the nearest hospital, which was Catholic.

My parents left me there overnight.  At about 8:00PM one of the nurses called my mother and said that I was refusing to eat and demanding to go to Florida.  My mother said, “He’s never even heard of Florida.”  She was told to come to the hospital immediately.  She saw me sitting in front of my tray of food refusing to eat and screaming, “Miami, Miami!”  To the nurses, that referred to a city in southern Florida.  My mother immediately understood that I was referring not to Miami, but to my “yami”—which was short for yamulka, the religious skullcap that every Jewish male must wear while eating.  I refused to eat without my yami, even though I was only 3 years old.  My response was automatic—programmed.  As soon as my mother made a yamulka for me out of a handkerchief and placed it on my head, I ate all the food and asked for doubles (the Catholic hospital provided kosher food for Jewish patients.)  I’m sure I mumbled the appropriate Bruchas for each item of food I imbibed.  


We learned these rules first at home and then in the Yeshiva—Jewish day school—that nearly everyone in the neighborhood attended.  As is typical in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, there were two competing Yeshivas:  One taught Yiddish, the other Hebrew.  

I started out in the Yiddish-speaking more traditional, school-named “Torahs Emes” (the Truthful Bible), where my grandma Ringel wanted me to go to learn the “Mamma Loshen”—the mother tongue.  But after two years, my parents switched me to the Hebrew-speaking, more modern Yeshiva, named “Etz Chaim” (the Tree of Life), which I attended through 8th grade, when I shifted to a Yeshiva high school until I finished 12th grade.

My Yeshiva education was a decidedly mixed blessing (both in the literal and figurative senses of that overworked phrase.)  The hours were long: elementary school went from 8:30AM to 4:30PM; high school from 9:00AM to 6:10PM.  We had only one full day off, Saturday, but it really wasn't a day off, since we spent much of it in the synagogue--9:00AM to noon and then afternoon and evening services, which varied in time depending on when it got dark (two stars had to be visible to the naked eye, or in the event there were clouds, "would have been" visible.)  Friday was an early day, with school ending at about 1PM to allow us to prepare for the Sabbath.  And Sunday was also a half day, though this compromise with secularism engendered grumbling from some of the old fashioned rabbis, who wanted us to spend the entire Christian day of rest in class.

Mornings were generally devoted to religious subjects—Bible (Tanach) Talmud, (Gemarah), ritual rules (Shulchan Aruch,) and ethics (Pirkay Avos.)  Afternoons were devoted to the usual secular subjects--math, science, history, English, French (for the smart kids who wanted to become doctors) or Spanish (for the rest of us), (no German or Latin), civics, gym, art, music appreciation--as well as "Jewish secular" subjects, such as Hebrew, Jewish history, Zionism and Jewish literature.  Then there was debate, student government, basketball and other "extracurricular" activities.  Lunch "hour", which was 35 minutes, separated the religious from the secular classes and was the only time we ever discussed the conflict between what we were taught in the morning, such as the creation story, and what we were taught in the afternoon, such as evolution and genetics.  No attempt was made to reconcile Torah (scripture) and Madah (secular knowledge).  They were simply distinct and entirely separate world views (or as my late colleague Steven Jay Gould put it in his always elegant choice of words, "separate magisteria").  We lived by the rule of separation between church and state, and for most of the students it raised no issue of cognitive dissonance.  In the morning, they thought like rabbis; in the afternoon like scientists; and there was no need to reconcile.  It was like being immersed in a good science fiction novel or film:  one simply accepted the premises and everything else followed quite logically.  

For a few of us, that wasn't good enough.  I recall vividly our efforts to find--or contrive--common ground.  For some, this quest took them to wonder whether the God of Genesis could have created evolution.  For them there was an abiding faith that both religion and science could both be right.  For me, the common ground was an abiding conviction that both could be wrong--or at least incomplete as an explanation of how we came to be.  I was skeptical of both religion and science.  Genesis, though elegant and poetic, seemed too simple.  But so did evolution--at least the way we were taught it.  

The apparent conflict between religion and science did not move me to search for reconciliation.  It moved me to search for doubts, for holes (not black ones, but grey ones), for inconsistencies not between religion and science--that was too easy--but rather within religious doctrine and within scientific "truth."  I loved hard questions.  I hated the easy answers often given, with a smirk of self-satisfaction by my religious and secular teachers.  

The mission of our modern Orthodox Yeshiva was to integrate us into the mainstream of American life while preserving our commitment to modern Orthodox Judaism.  “Torah” and “Madah” were the two themes.  Torah, which literally means bible, represented the religious component.  Madah, which literally means knowledge, represented the secular component.  They were thought to be reconcilable, though little explicit effort was directed at reconciling the very different world views implicit in the relatively closed system of Orthodox Judaism and the openness that is required to obtain real secular knowledge.  When it came to culture, however, there was actually very little conflict, because becoming good Americans—including immersing ourselves in mainstream American culture—was part of the mission of our schools.  Of course I hated anything the teachers tried to imbue in us, because with a few exceptions, they taught by rote and memorization.  Although I was good at memorization, I rebelled against the authoritarianism implicit in religious teaching.  

As much as I hated my teachers, they hated me even more.   I loved conflict, doubt, questions, debates and uncertainty.  I expressed these attitudes openly, often without being called on.  I was repeatedly disciplined for my “poor attitude.”  My 6th grade report card, which I still have, graded me “unsatisfactory” in “deportment” and “getting along with others.”  I received grades of D in “effort,” D in “conduct,” D in “achievement,” C in spelling, D in “respects the rights of others,” D in “comprehension,” C+ in geography and A in “speaks clearly.”  One teacher even gave me an “unsatisfactory” in “personal hygiene.”  My mother, who was meticulous about cleanliness and scrubbed me clean every day before school, complained.  The teacher replied, “his body is clean, but his mind is dirty; he refuses to show respect to his rabbis.”

To be sure, I was a mediocre Yeshiva student--actually I exaggerate:  I was slightly worse than mediocre, once having actually received a grade of "Bayn Ani Minus," which literally means "mediocre minus."  I couldn't even quite make it to mediocrity.  At least I had something to which to aspire!  

When I was in sixth grade, the school decided to administer IQ tests to all the students.  The school called my mother and said that I had gotten one of the highest scores.  At first the rabbi thought I had cheated, but when he was persuaded that in fact I had a high IQ he decided to put me in the A class.  We had a track system and the grades were divided into the A, B and C classes.  I had always been in the C class.  My mother was worried about me having to compete with all those smart kids, so she persuaded the principal to compromise and put me in the B class, where I remained, getting C’s until I graduated.  I spent my four high school years in what was called "the garbage class," which focused more on discipline than learning.

I had a well deserved reputation in both elementary and high school as a “bad kid”.  My grades were low (except on state-wide standardized tests called the “regents,” which I always aced).  My conduct, called “deportment,” was terrible.  I was always getting into trouble because of my pranks, because I “talked back” and was “fresh” to teachers, because I questioned everything, because I didn’t show “respect,” and because I was a “wise guy.”

This was the greatest gift—ok, I will even say "blessing"—of my Yeshiva education:  To question everything and everyone.  It was merely an unintended consequence of the Yeshiva method, and I was certainly not its only beneficiary or (according to the rabbis) its only failure.  The Jewish characteristic of questioning is not a complete coincidence.  It is a product of experiences, and surely the Yeshiva education--which juxtaposes religion and science with little explicit effort to reconcile these distinct approaches to the search for truth--is an element of these experiences, for at least some young Jews.  It certainly was for me, and for that I will be eternally grateful.  

I also need to thank my local synagogue for helping me discover sex.  To this day I am convinced that some higher authority built the benches at precisely the right height to introduce sexual feelings at precisely the right time.  When Orthodox Jews pray, they shake back and forth while standing up.  At a certain point in my life, the top of the bench in front of me, which had a curve on the top, was exactly parallel to my genitals while I stood in prayer.  It was while shuckling back and forth in the synagogue that I experienced my first arousal.  


What then was my "take away" from Yeshiva?  For me it has been a lifelong "belief" in the "certainty" of "doubt."  For most of my classmates, the take away has been a lifelong belief in the certainty of certainty.  Why the difference?  Surely minor genetic disparities do not explain such a profound difference in world views.  Nor does mere intelligence, since many of my “certain” classmates were brilliant.  I think it was the environment underneath the roof of our homes.  I came to Yeshiva ready to doubt.  Although my parents were both strictly observant, relatively modern Orthodox Jews, they too were skeptics, especially my mother.  Despite her lack of formal education and high culture, she was a cynic, always doubting, always questioning, though this became less apparent as she grew older and observed--to her chagrin--what she had actually transmitted to her children.  She doubted while continuing to observe all the rituals.  That was the traditional Jewish approach to learning and ritual—doubt all you want, but do!  My brother and I started that way, but ultimately our doubts carried over into action--or more precisely inaction.  We stopped observing in our mid 20s.  My mother couldn't understand or accept that.  "I don't care what you believe or don't believe," she would insist, "as long as you go to Shul, keep kosher and don't work (broadly defined to include driving, watching television or going to a ballgame) on Shabbas."  That's all she asked of us.  "Is that so much to ask!"  

When we started to break the rules, my mother began to doubt her doubting.  Doubting was good as long as it didn't lead to breaking with the rituals--as it didn't in her case.  Or so she believed, until she saw, with her own eyes, the wages of doubt, in her own children.  This led her to doubt doubt and to embrace certainty.  She would never completely abandon her doubting nature, but she no longer believed that doubt was cost-free.  It had cost her to lose her own children to "excessive doubt" and the real sin of acting on one's doubt.  I certainly don't mean to suggest that our mother "lost" us in any sense other than the observance of ritual, but that was critically important to her.  Although my brother and I maintained an extremely close relationship until her death at age 95--we spoke to her almost every day--it was never quite the same once we left the "club" and followed our own rules as it pertained to Jewish practices.  

My mother even questioned her decision to “let me go to Brooklyn College.”  She insisted that I would have “turned out better” if I had gone to Yeshiva University, but I didn’t have that option, because Yeshiva turned me down.  (More on that later).

My mother may not have been happy with the way I used the doubt she instilled in me, but I have been ecstatic.  It has become the most important quality in my life--and the most significant ingredient in whatever success I may have achieved.  It certainly played an important role in my decision to become a lawyer defending freedom of speech, accused criminals, and other unpopular causes.  (More on that later.)  So thank you Mom!  And even thank you Yeshiva Etz Chaim and Yeshiva University High School for provoking me to be a skeptic, a doubter and an agnostic about life.  (And thank you Yeshiva University for turning me down!)

My mother influenced me in many ways with her skepticism, not the least of which was when she repeatedly had to defend me for my conduct at school.  I remember one incident in particular.  I was playing “Ring A Levio” in the schoolyard on any icy winter day and chasing a classmate named Victor Botnick.  He slipped and his leg got stuck under the gate and he broke it while trying to stand up.  I was accused of deliberately breaking his leg and called into the principal’s office.  My mother immediately came to school and spoke to me privately.  I told her the story and assured her that I would never break my friend Victor’s leg purposely.  My mother went to the principal’s office with me and served as my defense attorney, making charts and diagrams that proved that I could not have possibly broken his leg deliberately and that he caused it to break while trying to stand up with his foot still stuck under the gate.  I was acquitted, though the Principal still had his suspicions.  This was my first experience with the adversarial process and with a defense attorney.  My mother, of course, was not a lawyer, having attended college for only part of one semester.  But she was my Perry Mason, and an important inspiration for why I decided to become a defense lawyer.  For me the presumption of innocence was not a theory.  I knew I was innocent, yet the principal presumed me guilty.  Only my mother’s effective advocacy kept me from being suspended—at least this time.

My decision to become a criminal lawyer was certainly not influenced by any exposure to real crime.  I lived in a neighborhood where we never locked our doors and where violent crime was unheard of.  There were of course street fights, in which I frequently participated - - more often as victim than victor - - but the Borough Park section of Brooklyn was a safe neighborhood.  [I guess that’s why my family was so mystified when my brother failed to return home from a shopping errand immediately after the end of the Sabbath, on Saturday night.  My mother had sent him to the store to buy a bottle of milk; it was usually a fifteen-minute errand.  An hour passed and there was no sign of Nathan, who we called, and I still call, Tully.  I thought he was kidnapped and started to empty my piggy bank to gather the ransom.  It turned out that he was in fact kidnapped, but only temporarily and not for any ransom.  On his way to the store a rabbi grabbed him and pulled him into the little synagogue in his home.  It seems that they only had nine Jewish males and they could not end the Sabbath without a tenth to form a minyan for the closing prayer.  My brother was therefore grabbed off the street and made to participate in the service so that they could complete the prayer and the others could go out and do their shopping.  It was as close as my family ever came to experiencing a crime, at least while I was growing up.]  [possible omission] 

Several years after I moved out of the house, my parents’ apartment was burglarized.  All the burglars took were Jewish ritual items, such as the Hanukah Menorah, the Sabbath candles, etc.  When my mother called to tell me about the burglary, I responded, “See, Jews can be burglars too.”  Without a moment’s hesitation my mother rebuked me, “They weren’t Jews, they were Israelis.”  For my mother, real Jews, who in her world were all orthodox, and Israelis, who tended to be secular, were completely different breeds.

My father, though rarely at home, influenced me as well.  He had a small store on the lower east side, where he sold wholesale during the week and retail on Sunday (he was of course closed on Saturday).  I would sometimes help him on Sunday after my school finished at 1:00 pm.  One Sunday he got a ticket for violating the Sunday closing law.  I went to court with him a few days later and the presiding judge was man named Hyman Barshay.  It was my first experience in a real court.  He asked my father why he was open on Sunday and my father responded that he had to stay closed on Saturday because he was an Orthodox Jew and he couldn’t afford to be closed for two days.  “Did you go to Schul on Saturday?” the judge asked.  My father replied, “Of course.”  The judge challenged him, asking, “Then what was the Torah portion of the week?”  When my father responded correctly, the judge tore up the ticket.  If he had gotten the answer wrong, the judge would’ve doubled the fine.  So much for separation between church and state.

This was not my only experience with the First Amendment.  Shortly thereafter, my friends and I decided to form a social athletic club - - a euphemism for a Jewish gang, but without the rough stuff.  We named our club The Shields and we designed our own jackets, which we got wholesale, since the father of one of our members owned an athletic store.  His name was “Snot” Chaitman.  I leave the source of that nickname to your imagination.  Whitey, the leader of our club, decided that we should have something sexy and not at all Jewish looking (whatever that meant).  Accordingly, the colors we selected were chartreuse and black.  We really wanted to look like hoods, despite our generally wimpy nature.  Our yeshiva immediately banned the jackets as too tough looking and not consistent with the Jewish values of the school.  Fortunately one of our club members lived across the street from the school, and so we would go to school wearing normal approved clothes, then immediately upon leaving school go to our friend’s house and change into our costumes.  We felt like super heroes, but I was no longer jumping out of windows. 

Boro Park in the 1940s and 50s was not only a religious neighborhood; it was a funny neighborhood.  Two houses away from me lived Jackie Mason.  Around the corner was Eliot Gould (ne Goldstein).  A few blocks away, in my uncle’s building, lived Buddy Hackett.  Woody Allen grew up in a nearby neighborhood, as did Larry David.

Joke telling among my friends was a competitive sport.  (In those days there were new jokes because our parents and grandparents didn’t tell jokes—at least not to us kids, but older brothers were a good source.)  We didn’t know anybody who actually made up a joke.  Every rendition would begin with, “I heard a good joke,” or “have you heard the one about—the rabbi and the farmer’s daughter, or the rabbi, the priest and the minister?”  (The rabbi always came out on top!)

The first joke I remember hearing (and telling) involved a put-down of communist Russia.  It was about the time the Russians wanted to one-up the Americans by ordering a large number of condoms 14 inches long.  The Americans sent them the 14 inch condoms—marked “medium.”  The jokes improved as we got older!

Our favorite radio show was “Can you top this,” which involved professional comics who would try to top each other and listeners who submitted jokes.  A “laugh meter” determined whose joke was funniest.   There were cash prizes for listeners who topped the pros.  The jokes told by panelists, such as Harry Hershfield and Joe Laurie, Jr., had to be spontaneous and related to the subject of the original joke.  The panelists boasted that they knew 15,000 jokes among them.

We would sit around the radio and try to top the pros.  We would also send in our own jokes, which were never chosen.  But we often thought our jokes were as good or better than theirs.  

Living in a funny neighborhood at a funny time and listening to funny shows served me well.  (My wife thinks too well, since I often use humor to avoid discussing serious issues.)  I use humor in the courtroom, in the classroom and in every other aspect of my life.  A highlight of my current summers is sitting on the porch of the Chilmark store on Martha’s Vineyard and playing a contemporary version of “Can you top this?” with my friend Harold Ramis, who knows more than 15,000 Jewish jokes!  Sometimes Larry David, Ted Danson, Seth Myers or Tony Shalub drop by.  I never “top” Harold, but I hold my own.

I learned many of my jokes in the Catskill Mountains where I worked as a busboy over the Jewish holidays.  The only hotel that would hire me was the King David.  It was a run-down place that conveniently burned to the ground right after the Jewish holidays.  It was across the road from The Posh Brown’s, made famous by Jerry Lewis, who frequently performed there.  Nearby were Grossingers, Concord, Kutchers, President, Nevelle, Tamarak, Pine View and Pioneer.  I played and watched basketball, played “Simon Says” with Lou Goldstein, who claimed to have invented the game, and snuck into the shows that featured Alan King, Freddie Roman, Sheky Green and Red Burrons.  It was “Can you top this?” on steroids.  Plus, there were girls.  

Although we were orthodox Jews, none of us abided by the orthodox rules regulating sexuality.  We were as anxious to make out as anyone; the problem was we had no one to make out with because the girls all had to be beyond reproach.  The closest we ever came to a good squeeze was when we went to the Cyclone at Coney Island.  We were all scared, but figured the girls would be more frightened and would cuddle up to us during the dangerous ride. Sometimes we tried to pick up non-Jewish girls at Coney Island, because we heard they had wild reputations (meaning we could get to “first base”).  We wore our basketball jackets, which said “Talmudical” - - our school was Brooklyn Talmudical Academy.  (The full name was Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and Talmudical Academy, Yeshiva University High School, Brooklyn Branch, Boys Division.  Imagine the locomotive cheer!)  The colors for these jackets were selected by the school.  Not surprisingly there were blue and white - -very Jewish.  “Talmudical” was not a particularly good visual for pick-ups, so we turned our jackets inside out.  The raincoat side was gray and read “B.T.A.”, which we told the girls stood for “Brooklyn Technical Aviation.”  It still didn’t work.

In our senior year we discovered that a train ride to Manhattan and a bus ride to Union City would get us to the burlesque house where at least we could see what we could not touch.  One day a group of us went, and we took along one particularly orthodox classmate who insisted on wearing his yamulka during the show.  The rest of us had tucked ours into our pockets.  Of course we sat in the front row, to get the best view.  When a drunken guy in the back started screaming “Take it off, Take it off,” Irving was sure he was referring to his yarmulke.  He stood and confronted the guy shouting: "I will not take it off.  I am proud of my yarmulke.”  To this day, whenever I see Irving, I always yell, “Take it off! Take it off!”  He’ll never live it down.


The yeshiva I went to was strongly Zionist, supporting Israel’s struggle for independence, but the rabbis hated David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first leader.  Ben Gurion was an atheist who believed that Israel should be a secular socialist democracy.  My rabbis wanted it to be an orthodox Jewish theocracy.  Thank God Ben Gurion won, though he ultimately reached an uncomfortable compromise with the rabbis.  (Recently, I acquired a letter Ben Gurion wrote in 1963, stating that the religious and secular elements of Israeli society must be sensitive to each other’s beliefs: 

     “There is no doubt that the feelings of a religious man are to be respected, but religious people must respect the freedom of choice of a fellow man, and no coercion is to be exercised for or against religious conduct.”  

These words could have been spoken by Jefferson or Madison.)

 One day, David Ben Gurion was giving a speech in Central Park to a vast audience of supporters.  My friend Tsvi Groner, who subsequently made “Aliya” to Israel, and I decided to cut school to listen to Ben Gurion.  When we were caught being out of school we had to make up a lie.  We told the rabbis that we’d gone to a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game.  For that we received far less of a punishment than we would have had we admitted going to hear the atheist Ben Gurion.  

My mother was summoned to my high school so often that some of the students thought she worked in the principal’s office.  One day, after I had done something especially egregious—I threw a “dummy” dressed like me off the roof of the building, after threatening to “jump off the roof” when my teacher threw me out of the class 12 —the principal demanded of my mother “what are we going to do with your son?”  Without any hesitation my mother responded, “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but as for me, I’m going to keep him.”  The principal threatened to send me to another school called “R.J.J.,” which we always said, stood for “Reformatory for Jewish Juveniles,” because some of the tougher kids—the disciplinary “problems”—went there.  (The initials really stood for “Rabbi Jacob Joseph”).  Ultimately I was suspended for a few weeks on the ground of “lack of respect” and spent them at the local library and museum, where I learned considerably more than I was learning in my classes.

It was not my first suspension, nor would it be my last.  Nor would it be my first encounter with my principal, Rabbi Zuroff, who in my senior year, when he was finally resigned to my remaining in the school until graduation, called me to his office for some career advice.  This is what he told me:  “You have a good mouth, but not much of a ‘Yiddisher Kup,’” which means ‘Jewish head’ or brain, as distinguished from a Goyisher (non-Jewish) Kup”—a slightly bigoted concept suggesting that Jews are endowed with special mental qualities or capacities. 13   He continued:  “You should do something where you use your mouth, not your brains.”  I asked him what he would suggest.  He replied:  “You should become either a lawyer, or a Conservative Rabbi.”  (He was an Orthodox Rabbi who held his Conservative colleagues in utter contempt.)  To make sure the latter part of his advice was followed, he urged Yeshiva University, which trained Orthodox Rabbis, to reject me, which it did.

My classmates as well valued my verbal over my intellectual skills.  The first draft of my high school yearbook description said that I have “a mouth of Webster, but a head of clay.”  (My mother made them change it!)

Rabbi Zuroff’s career advice was actually better than the choices given to me by the New York City Department of Employment, to which my mother turned in desperation.  After reviewing my high school record, and administering an aptitude test, the counselor told my mother that I could aspire to work in an advertising firm or a “funeral parlor.”  My mother asked whether I could be a lawyer, to which the counselor replied, “Mrs. Dershowitz, I’m afraid you have to go to college to be a lawyer, and your boy just isn’t college material.”

Many years later, following a talk I gave at a temple in Los Angeles, a man about my age came up to me and asked whether I was “related to a guy I went to high school with named Avi Dershowitz.”  “Avi” was the Hebrew nick-name by which I was known all through high school.  I began to use my “real” name, Alan, when I started Brooklyn College, though my old friends and family still call me Avi.

I decided to put the questioner on, so I said, “yeah, yeah, we are related.”  

“What ever happened to Avi?”  he asked.  

I continued the put on:  “We don’t talk about him in our family.  He came to no good.”  

Showing no surprise, my questioner replied:  “I knew he would come to no good.  He was such a bad kid in high school.”

I’m sure some of my critics would agree that I came to “no good,” but at least by objective standards I’ve exceeded the expectations my high school teachers and principal had for me.  None of them thought I was “college material.”

This assessment was recently confirmed by a classmate who I encountered in Florida.  We had been friends during our first two years in high school and then, quite suddenly, his parents moved to a different city and I had no contact with him for nearly 60 years.  When we first spoke on the phone, I asked him what he had done after leaving Talmudical Academy in Brooklyn.  He told me had had moved away and then come back to New York City for college.  When I told him that I had attended Brooklyn College and then law school, he seemed surprised.  I suspect that he too, along with others of my classmates, didn’t think I was “college material.”

The only successful part of my high school career, other than my debating, was making the varsity basketball team.  Though I was never a starter (except when one or two of the starters were sick), I did manage to accompany my team to Madison Square Garden for the inter-Yeshiva finals.  I shared a locker with Dolph Schayes, (who, you know was born before 1933, since after that no Jewish boy was ever again named Adolph) whose team, the Syracuse Nationals, was playing against the N.Y. Knicks in the main event to which our game was a preliminary.  One of the people on the opposing team was a kid even shorter than me named Ralph Lipschitz.  He eventually decided that to make it in the fashion business he would have to change his name.  So Lipschitz became Lauren.  

All of the teams we played against in our league were Jewish high schools, but some were much more orthodox than we were.  We did not wear yarmulkes when we played, but some of our opponents did.  They believed that it was improper to walk more than four steps without wearing a yarmulke.  In one game, one of my opponents stole a ball from me and had a open lane to the basket.  He was very fast and so I had no hope of catching him.  Instead I grabbed the yarmulke off the top of his head and threw it on the floor and yelled, “You can’t go more than four steps.”  He stopped, shot the ball and missed.  I got a technical foul, which was well deserved.  If the Anti-Defamation League had heard about my actions it might well have qualified as an anti-Semitic incident, but all’s fair in love and basketball.

Basketball was not our only passion.  We all loved baseball, especially since Ebbets Field was located four blocks from our high school.  The morning recess generally coincided with the time when several of the players walked past our school to the stadium.  Remember that these players were working stiffs being paid low salaries and generally taking public transportation to and from the games.  We would wait for them to pass school and walk with them to Ebbets Field.  I got to know several of the players, including Carl Furillo, Pee Wee Reese, Gene Hermansky, Gil Hodges and Ralph Branca (whose mother, it now turns out, was Jewish!).  Jackie Robinson, who was our real hero, generally was driven to the stadium for safety reasons.  I will never forget Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers.  We persuaded our European-born rabbi to make a special blessing for him, without his knowing whom he was blessing, since he never would have approved blessing a baseball player.  We made up a Hebrew name for Jackie Robinson, calling him Yakov (Jacob) Gnov (Rob) buh (in) Ben (son).  When he got his first hit, we were convinced the blessing had worked.  I had a spiral notebook in which I had collected autographs of every single Brooklyn Dodger who played during my high school years.  As soon as I moved out of the house my mother tossed it in the garbage pail, along with my signed baseball cards and comic book collection.  I could’ve been a millionaire….
When the Dodgers were not at home, we would play softball in the parking lot adjacent to Ebbets Field.  One day we made headlines when one of my classmates hit a homerun from the parking lot over the Ebbets Field wall.  The Brooklyn Eagle reported that it was the first time anyone had hit a home run into rather than out of the ballpark.

It’s not surprising that my high school memories are long on sports and short on academics, because my academic performance was abysmal.  In my senior semester my first half grades were as follows (I still have the report card):  English 80; Math 60 (F); Hebrew 65; History 65; Physics 60 (F).  With two failing grades, I couldn’t graduate, and so by the end of the last semester, I raised my physics grade to the minimum passing number of 65; my math grade to 75; and my history grade to 70 (the others remained the same).  Yet despite my poor grades, I still remember much of what the teachers taught, often quite poorly.  Other, more useful, information from Yeshiva has also stayed with me, especially from the Torah, the Talmud and Jewish history.  Half a century after finishing my religious education, I wrote a book entitled “The Genesis of Justice,” in which I analyzed the first book of the Bible from a secular lawyer’s perspective.  I never could have done this without my Jewish education.  When I showed the galley proofs to my Uncle Zacky, an Orthodox rabbi, he said he admired its intellectual content but not its heretical views.  He pleaded with me to “change just one word.”  I asked him, “which word?”  He responded “the word ‘Dershowitz’ on the cover.  

In my family, directness was more of a virtue than politeness, and interrupting someone was a sign of respect.  It meant, "I get it, so you don't have to finish your thought.  Now let me tell you why you're wrong."  The interrupter fully expected to be interrupted in turn, and so on.  Nobody ever got to finish what they were saying.  Now that's a good conversation.  I'm reminded of the joke about the pollster who approaches four random people in Times Square and says, "Excuse me, I'd like your opinion on the meat shortage."  The first one, an Ethiopian replies, "There's a word I don't understand, what ‘meat?’ is?"  The second, an American, also says there's a word he doesn’t understand: "What's "shortage?'"  The third, from China, also doesn't understand something: "What's opinion?"  Finally, the Israeli too says there's something he doesn't understand: "What's 'excuse me?'"  We never said "excuse me."  Conventional politeness was not part of our language.  Nor was rudeness. We simply didn't regard interrupting someone as rude, as long as everyone eventually got to say what they wanted.

My mother regarded people who were “too polite” with suspicion:  “You never know what Muriel is really thinking,” she would say about my extremely polite Aunt (by marriage, of course) Muriel, who lived upstairs from us and was married to my somewhat rude (in the best sense of that word, at least to my family) Uncle Hedgie, who you always knew exactly what he was thinking.

When I began teaching at age 25, some of my more "proper" students objected to my constant interruptions, until I persuaded them that being interrupted was a compliment, signifying that their point had been made and understood.  ("We get it.")  Some televisions viewers have also written to me about my penchant for interrupting opposing "talking heads."  It's simply a matter of style, not rudeness, though some mistake the former for the latter.

Another blessing of my early religious training relates to memory and my use of it in my professional life.  My mother was blessed (cursed?) with a near perfect memory.  (Probably more nature than nurture.)  She could recall virtually everything from her youth.  When she was in her 80s, she would spot someone on the train and go over to her and ask her “Aren’t you Mildred Cohen and weren’t you in my sixth grade class?”  She was invariably right.  She remembered, word for word, what she had been taught in the third or fourth grade.  She remembered every melody she had ever learned, even though she never went to concerts and didn’t listen to recordings as an adult.  She could recite from memory long poems she learned in elementary school.  Most surprising of all, she had committed to memory an entire Latin mass, which a Catholic elementary schoolteacher, in an effort to Americanize the children of immigrants, had made her learn by heart.  She had no idea what it meant, but it was one of her favorite parlor tricks to repeat its Latin words, accompanied by the church melody she had learned.  She never forgot anything she had heard, read or smelled.  Growing up with a mother who never forgot was a curse for me, because I did a good many things I wish she could forget.