TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062491/0624471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 85 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 64

A Perverse Brilliance


CHUTZPAH
By Alan M. Dershowitz
Little, Brown; 378 pages; $22.95


    When Naftuli Ringel arrived in the U.S. in 1907, the best
available job was shohet -- ritual slaughterer. But the
immigrant was too sensitive for throat cutting, and he chose to
become a peddler. Assimilation works wonders in America; 84
years later, his grandson has developed an unerring instinct for
the jugular vein.

    The author, perhaps best known for his defense of Claus
von Bulow, was a central character in the film Reversal of
Fortune. Ron Silver accurately portrayed him as an amalgam of
clenched hair and perverse brilliance. Those eager for a sequel
have only to consult Chutzpah. The title is a Yiddish term that
resists translation. In a word, gall. In two words, Alan
Dershowitz.

    In this autobiographical screed, Dershowitz begins with a
childhood in an Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn. The boy was
too secular for Talmudic scholarship, but he proved to be a
stubborn and flashy debater. A fellow student appraised him:
Alan "has a mouth of Webster and a head of Clay." The mouth went
on to Yale Law School, where he ranked first in his class, yet
found himself locked out of prominent legal firms because of
"the world of bigotry, discrimination, racism, and anti-Semitism
called the American bar."

    Dershowitz eventually landed a teaching job at Harvard Law
School. There, gratitude was not his long suit. Neither was
tweed. He recalls his fellow Jews on the faculty: they didn't
" `dress British and think Yiddish.' They thought British too.
Their Anglophilia . . . affected their mannerisms, their
attitudes, their style of speech, their choice of metaphors,
even their jokes." None of this for Dershowitz, then or now. His
attire, jokes and attitude proclaim him as the peddler's
militant grandson: out for social justice and civil rights, and
along the way maybe a little advertising wouldn't hurt.

    Dershowitz is guilty of many excesses, but moral blindness
is not one of them. That he leaves to his opponents: Angela
Davis, a leader of the American Communist Party, used him as a
consultant when she was charged with murder. Acquitted, she
vowed to spend the rest of her life defending political
prisoners. When she journeyed to Moscow, Dershowitz asked the
radical to speak up on behalf of Soviet Jewry. She refused
because " `they are all Zionist fascists and opponents of
socialism.' Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where
they belonged." Dershowitz's other targets include Pat Buchanan,
Jesse Jackson, Meir Kahane and Norman Podhoretz. All made the
mistake of locking horns with a master prosecutor; all come off
a bloody second best.

    It is on defense that the attorney is ill advised. His
accounts of anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle East are
little more than a catalog borrowed from more capable
historians. And his preening modesty belongs in a textbook of
self-caricature: "Several years ago, Elie Wiesel flattered me
by publicly stating that `if there had been a few people like
Alan Dershowitz during the 1930s and 1940s, the history of
European Jewry might have been different.' Generous as the
assessment is, it is an obvious exaggeration."

    The author belongs on the short list of great trial
lawyers, and his insights remain essential for understanding the
American judicial process. But Dershowitz has a larger subject
in mind: his ego. It would have been better to leave the
appraisal to others. The man who does his own public relations
has more than chutzpah; he has a schlemiel for a client.

    -- By Stefan Kanfer